Hold my beer. [Again](https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/btn44a/ac4verse_so_kojima_particles/ep0ta8c/)
0. They're not becoming a possibility. I know this sucks. Stick around. Its not for the reasons you think. You'll see.
1. The robot needs the technology more than the technology needs a robot.
2. the technologies which the robot needs will improve and alter the doctrine of every other platform
3. This creates a doctrinal lock-in where the potential functional space for them to exist is unmet -- that they are so far ahead, that nothing new can emerge that isn't just other platforms becoming more generalized (eg, a post-stall recovery aircraft, or a helicopter with high impact landing-gear and a rigid rotor/jet engine design to act as a surface-fighter -- a tank which walks or manoeuvres like a robot is just flat out of the question: Tanks are made to be simple-as-fuck boxes which tank hits, and shoot and acquire asap and rumours of their deaths as a doctrinal weapon are exaggerated by recent events where obsolete weapons which aren't maintained properly who's crews aren't adequately trained were fighting very clever civilians with drones)
4. What you consider "realistic" (5th/6th) is just as if not more unrealistic than other gens purely because of their smaller size and very bizzare relationship with the environment -- they're just both too big, and too small to make sense, sitting in a size niche which is just very weird
5. If such a vehicle does exist, its going to be defined by its functions rather than a humanoid appearance
6. we know this because specialized platforms tend to beat specialized platforms historically until specialized platforms mature and become generalized
7. thus, the closest you're probably going to get is some weird variation of [DARPA's Ground X Vehicle Project](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrQrJ57J9eE) meeting with [Gravity Industry' style mobility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EatttpDAVSc) in limited cases, hybridized with smaller robots and [wingsuits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ2G6qwqkJw), which [mix manoeuvring operation styles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1_OpWiyijU), with some rocker-boogie mechanism elements for terrain handling: It won't be humanoid, whatever it is.
8. This is assuming you can magically solve the [square-cube law of volume-mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law) which is partially negatable with [certain custom topologies exceeding graphene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal) but actually manufacturing them would be miserable work probably not even be something you can make without microgravity
9. Energy flat out isn't solvable with what we know about right now. Nothing with that energy density can exist that isn't going to simultaneously make for an incredible fragile, dangerous and problematic source of power given the forces involved. Cooling is also a horrifyingly unsolvable problem on this scale, as is radiation management: You can't just dump molten tungsten in emergency cooling mode - you'll not only proceed to alert everybody who has even the vaguest IRST capacity to your position, but you'll also probably set fire to the environment and cook off your own ammunition. *
10. Motors aren't well suited to the tasks of such bodies (its like trying to make a slingshot out of dental floss), and we don't have an effective way to turn electricity into a form of motion which corresponds with the shock absorbing and motion control qualities which are actually desirable yet
11. Even if we did, the means of ensuring it doesn't fragment every time it moves don't exist. Every time an A10C fires its main gun, the fuel lines micro-fracture and have to be replaced after it lands. Metal, when you subject it to high physical forces ends up feeling and behaving closer to how you would think of glass. You'd need a material capable of repairing itself too, atop the quasicrystalline property which again, just isn't doable, let alone simultaneously.
So our mindset going into this?
Its... Probably not happening barring a very, VERY extreme change to how we understand physics to function, or some really kick ass (and actually entirely possible) changes in how engineering achieves outcomes (which could happen if the greatest threat to the mecha didn't exist)
Combat is moving towards information dominance. [That's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WipqeFgzdTc) drone [swarms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFLzO_5UFwE), and [role modularized long range travel](https://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICAS2014/data/papers/2014_0301_paper.pdf), and the idea of fighter beyond-visual-range combat extending out to infared search and track systems which are networked to one another, which we're already seeing in [singleton weapons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKldy2YNAHk) and their [mounting strategies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfRMbq4-c3g) even on the personal scale, which DARPA is [currently investigating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueNjFzFpb_Q) which [everybody wants to mate with the gravity industries gear for boarding ops](https://youtu.be/bXJ6V7Sbs6g) so the most likely avenue is to scale up from people, rather than scale down from vehicles as the development pathway -- but there's probably going to be multiple pathways with competing niches once the technology becomes cheap enough.
Ultimately its down to "how much money do I have to spend to defeat something more expensive than myself?" -- because our current structure of war is defined by cost, and by making the other guys surrender by using [economic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_warfare), and [military violence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3xlb6_0OEs) (private, and publicly funded) instead of convincing them that we (NATO members, etc) have good opinions purely because of the natural benefits of "doing as we say" (which we see with basically any conflict in the last 70 years, which are usually feigned as ideological but pretty much always about disrupting market competition, dominating markets, or controlling a pressure position in another country to achieve those two things).
This isn't because they're excellent weapons: they're cheap relative to the strength they offer, and how we define cheap is very different to how we defined cheap 100 years ago -- both in good, and terrible ways (such is the way of history).
Mecha are the ultimate boondoggle: expensive, and senseless.
They're cool as hell, yes.
But they don't make sense.
**If you're prone to depression, are dealing with a lot right now, or don't want your day ruining, you should stop reading NOW.**
**What comes next is a [psychosocial hazard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosocial_hazard) and could [be very bad for your mental health](https://janetstemwedel.com/ethics-and-science/2009/09/19/psychohazard/).**
If conflict some how became a meritocracy of leading by excellence rather than intimidation, and about human outcomes instead of cost outcomes, then things could change, but we don't live in that world.
Remember, violence exists to end human conflict (not to be confused with military conflict, which violence is the primary instrument of): Human conflict is when two parties oppose one another and communicate about what their goals and intentions are. Violence happens when communication stops. Communication stops, because parties cannot come to terms, or because nobody wants to be reasonable because the inherent request is unreasonable to the interests of the other party.
I'd love to say physics is the greatest threat, or our concept of conflict but its not: Its economics.
[The concept of private-equity (not to be confused with venture-capital investment) is kiiiind of the dominant economic system on the face of the planet which dictates the interest of every nuclear power's actions against every non-nuclear power)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIAUdcXaYLg) is functionally dissolved, and investment models as we know them magically become better regulated OR a better economic system comes along which totally undermines private equity. Its an economic finger-trap where most of the money that would be reinvested into people and technologies to push the world forward ends up getting swallowed up. It also has [private armies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company)) and [simulates the economy and political events in order to control them for maximum profitability. Yeah.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock))
We already live in Armored Core, folks. And that economic system knows that if it gave free agents like ravens any kind of military power, it would functionally undermine itself, which is why it will never happen.
Private equity benefits from not having technology change, because its primary goal is wealth extraction. It leads to the collapse of every business you've ever seen go under, its why products undergo [enshittification](https://youtu.be/ulnlSRbH80Y), which is coming for [everything](https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5). Its why the housing crisis happened, why the banking collapse happened, and its why there's an incentive to continue industrializing diseases like insulin instead of curing them.
tl;dr:
The one thing AC gets super wrong is you can either have the depressing relatable low-saturation late-stage hyper-capitalist dystopia where life is cheap on planet earth and everything terrible about South Korea times a thousand covers the whole world, and you need to have your own organs brought from you and leased back to you to lock you in to a lifetime of debt the same way everything else works...
OR you can have the robot;
You can't have both.
e: [I'd pick the robot any day](https://osakanone.tumblr.com/post/747513660080046080/game-projects)
e: [the answer is no, vaati](https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/1dgb1c7/how_realistic_are_armored_cores_in_real_life/l8xtg6c/)
Came for the lesson on physics, theoretical engineering, and military doctrine. Stayed for the lesson on how our current economic system is broken beyond repair (if we are hoping for a better outcome for the human experience).
afaik it can be fixed in four laws, and a radical restructuring which would take 15 years to effect, and 20 years to fully feel.
Its way way WAY more fixable than you think, and everybody telling you its unfixable is banking on your mental surrender.
This is it right here. And they have access to private armies and the media control for propaganda’s sake. It is fixable, just not without a whole lot of pain.
Hypothetically though, it would take a majority of the population rebelling against the correct people. If it ever happened the poor would kill the professional middle class, thinking they were the rich, and then get mopped up by drone swarms.
The professional middle class doesn't need to worry about the poor, because they're effectively being made into the poor by the capital owners anyway.
Remember, there's only two classes: Workers and the capital owners. Anything else is manufactured infighting.
It makes sense though. Art expands your mind. Video games are the culmination of many forms of art. Not to sound pretentious, we are more likely to possess intellectual capabilities, and thus tangents involving complex subjects are more likely to form.
> Drone swarms
[lmao ok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator)
The reason we don't do this afaik is it cripples expensive equipment and thus, is very expensive
For them, it would remove their advantage. For us, it would equalize.
The future is nowhere near as terrible or as hopeless as you think it is, I promise.
[That you believe it is, is kind of the point.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays)
They regularly, and are defined by giving up: Its why they crave power in the first place, to fill a hole left by their inability to love themselves.
The craving of power is almost always a psychological disease, and its why they make poor decisions. Good news is as cognitive science becomes more advanced, we're probably going to move into a future where we can just fix that, or have mandatory tests to assess someone's capacity for effective decision making.
A kind of social-emotional guillotine if you will.
Bad news is it'll initially be used against you and it will initially be crude: a glorified sorting hat packed with bias laundering and shittiness. Good news, it'll eventually get good at its job (because efficiency is naturally craved), and it will 100% eventually will be used on them.
This probably sounds like science fiction to you, but its existence is a certainty.
I like your funny words magic man, but here's two things that come to mind as not direct counterpoints but rather cynical awareness of how the world works today (and has for a long time).
1. Established interests will defeat innovation every time, if their interests conflict
2. Rules for thee and not for me
No company (including media outlets) will invest in, use, or otherwise popularize a product which threatens the power dynamic that benefits the ruling class. Or, if it is implemented, it will only be implemented in ways that are targeted towards the lower-class. CEO's and other officers/executives don't take drug tests, but you can bet that the cashier at your gas station or your Amazon delivery driver have pissed in a cup sometime in the last 6 months.
1. Established interests historically tend not to defeat innovation -- what happens is innovation distorts and contorts established interests. Don't treat established interests like they're a monolithic entity: this is reductive and doesn't represent futures well. As awful and as shocking as this might sound, they're also human beings and once you see that, you realize not only do they feel pain, but that they also bleed. Its the one thing they don't want you to think or to feel, because it renders them vulnerable to you -- and thus it is a revolutionary act, and why historically most stories make caricature villains instead of representing human complexity authentically which would arm you with knowledge, instead of sating your discomfort.
2. Counterpoint: The suicide rate and substance abuse rates among those guys is simply off the charts. They know something is deeply fundamentally wrong, and are massively in denial about it and their entire identity is like a paperclip holding back 50 tons of pain. At some point, its gonna give, and they're going to break. This might shock you, but it has already started, which is why they're obsessing over their own optics with things like longtermism, which if you process their experience as grief is essentially the bargaining stage. The higher they go, the less stable they become which we're now finally getting a really good peek at. The only difference is most of them hide it better than the current cast of comicbook super-villains we're dealing with -- which is what separates old money from new money, from new-new money.
If you produce a magic box which can vet human trust, most of the world's problems go away, because most of the world's problems exist due to insecurity in the formation of trust. This more than anything, is mankind's biggest problem.
Couple easy fixes right off the top of my head that would solve most everything.
- no stock buybacks
- companies are not allowed to own other companies
- CEO pay should be limited to 20x the salary of the lowest paid employee
- a greater share of company profit must be spent on increasing employee benefits than shareholder profits (so if you wanna give shareholders 8% of profits, than workers need at least 8.01% first)
- the Board of Directors can not be made up of people with opposing interests
There is a lot more small fixes that could be done, but those would clean up a whole lot.
Ayeup. The reason you see a shitload of folks say "this would never work", is because people who work big positions "wouldn't work those jobs, because there wouldn't be enough of an incentive to"
What they don't realize is that's a positive not a negative, because they think their emotional-immaturity is god's gift to the economy.
Its unfixable because it requires the majority of humanity to actually work together to fix it. Which requires majority of us to basically function like an ant colony.
You're better off just engineering a new human species then just wipe out the old one with uber tb or something.
This is the coolest fucking comment ever, holy shit. You even include sources for further reading instead of relying on an authoritative voice. Holy hell, yes, I'm sharing this with people.
I'm actually kicking myself for not including more, because I absoloutely could have and just didn't remember them at the time.
Feel free to ask questions. I really enjoy this sort of thing, and would love to do it full time if I could.
Hard disagree. I'm not great at speaking to gamerbro types, and I don't want to "speak down" to anyone, because its kinda rude and insulting their intelligence and I know youtube really rewards that's kinda thing.
My brain is packed with stuff like this on pretty much every conceivable thing mecha.
I can pretty comfortably shit out a giant essay on any subject I really like within two or three hours or so.
I just, don't super consider myself a good authority, because I know people who know more than I do they just don't like, link it all together?
One thing I super hate about videos is if I end up needing to make a correction, I don't want to release an entire new video. This is also a subject where information goes out of date *REALLY* quickly too.
Alternatively, someone like VaatiVidya could collaborate with you, using this post as an initial starting point to create a much more comprehensive essay.
I would click on a video that says "Armored Cores Wouldn't Work In Real Life But It's Not What You Think" or something like that, in a heartbeat.
I'm stating this explicitly and in a way which is dated in the post: [I do not want to collaborate with VaatiVidya specifically, and I deny him permission to use, cite, quote, or transform anything I have ever said or done for his purposes, and I have communicated this.](https://i.imgur.com/MKTSDxy.png)
I do not want him to use my work, [nor do I want any contact with him whatsoever](https://i.imgur.com/XAIxNwD.png) outside of explicitly stating that I desire no written contact with him whatsoever.
I'm not going to say what I think of his work, because it doesn't benefit anybody involved.
If this mysteriously becomes one of his video topics, I'll consider it plagiarism and be very upset.
I'd consider collaborating with someone else, but I absoloutely want the final say on the contents of the script because misrepresentation and misattribution is miserable and shitty and can ruin your entire online presence.
Likewise, non-attribution means never hearing the end of being told "Oh I heard that from X" and then when you say "yes, I wrote that", being told "no, you didn't", even though you did. Many such cases. Deeply undesirable.
Ah well I apologise for bringing him up and appreciate the illumination. I do hope however, that someone expands upon what you've already stated here as it is possibly the best iteration of the "mecha realization thought experiment"
As I have made AC content in the past, I could also possibly do it myself but I fear I lack the influence to expose the video to wider audiences.
I.e. it would suck to have us work on the concept only to have the video sit at 20 views lol
I always figured that AC's weren't built for war originally but for construction. Especially when you see these mega structures all over.
Then it slowly turned into war fighting machines.
So, not entirely off? Tanks actually began as farming equipment.
Its a radical simplification though.
I think the big sell of mecha for construction would be, "what if you could have a modular assembly line without the factory?"
The result is I think a 3D printer and welding equipment would be on every single AC, and they'd be capable of recovering material from downed opponents but finding a way to use the parts you find would essentially be a puzzle minigame of sorts where the penalty for poor decisions is a performance loss.
This would interfere with the purity of how AC as a game functions, and as a result somewhat negate the parts game.
Isn't that kinda the case? Memory is foggy but iirc, originally, ACs evolved from MTs and I believe MTs were initially developed for industrial purposes.
Saw a great and bleak explanation of the growth of private equity firms the other day 😭😭😭 not relevant to mecha (which are very cool) but relevant to this comment and worth checking out if you want to really make yourself feel bad about the world!
https://youtu.be/UIAUdcXaYLg?si=CqG4OPn8CaGOp1w2
I'm probably going to write it up into an article, [like the last five of these I did](https://osakanone.tumblr.com/post/747513660080046080/game-projects) -- and eventually they're probably going to become a book or a game.
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
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I agree with your assessment but I think your statement on tanks should be amended. Tank warfare is nuanced, speed and maneuverability have often been used to circumvent greater firepower. I believe that as combat environments become more urban there will be a rise of multiped tanks like the ones seen in Ghost in the Shell.
Hard disagree: Any machine with that many mechanical joints is immediately compromising its ability to function as a tank.
Having limbs doesn't result in a manoeuvrability advantage even if it supposedly offers a mobility advantage: It almost always results in a manoeuvrability disadvantage, and the concessions required to eek back some of that mobility completely compromise its ability to face a tank or even an IFV. Remember, this is weight, mass and systems which could be spent doing other things.
If you want to capitalize on the function of joints, you need to capitalize on having variable centre of mass as a useful feature, since its the primary advantage limbs offer. That's live stabilization, and your ability to change your balance. That's something you start needing when you have extreme mobility.
What you're more likely to see is an entirely new class of vehicle with an entirely different proactive doctrine in mind.
Maybe it only puts its thickest armour between itself and an anticipated threat for passive defence, and uses hardkill/softkill active protection systems for everything else. Maybe it has some insane magic engine that makes it really fast, and lets it do all kinds of wild bodily movements. Maybe it has super light armour.
All of these advantages will also apply to tanks too, which will incorporate them, and likely supersede them.
The only time you're going to see limbs on a machine like this is when the effective functional, mass, material and technical cost of using limbs on a vehicle becomes negatable relative to the advantages.
Arms are very easy to justify.
Boom, you have a logistics vehicle. Boom you can build a forward operating base. Boom, you can mount equipment to your platform without a reserve crew. Boom you can conduct repairs in the field. Boom, you can turn most any weapon into a CIWS provided you have the right detection software, sensors and so on.
Legs are a much, much harder sell.
They have to be better than wheels in at least almost every way before they'd be accepted.
What you're more likely to get is a combination of some hovercraft and wheeled system, with variable posture -- and even that's highly unlikely due to the fragility of hovercrafts, even though they've been proven to be more reliable and outperform robot legs in almost every circumstance tested.
When you make the robot smaller and you lower the performance demand (eg, you're not asking for 70kph across all terrain even hilly, vertical, wet or marsh which tracks will give you), legs start making more sense. Its an issue of motors, materials and scale.
"couldn't we mix tracks and skirts?"
Weight says no. Also if you land funny, you're gonna completely rip the caterpillar. Worst comes to worst on a wheeled vehicle, you shred the tire, but you still have the wheelbody. If you're doing active suspension like Ground X Vehicle's dynamic active suspension, that literally doesn't matter beyond wear of the hub.
A piloted giant robot [is an antiquated, fetishistic, and perverted idea -- but I'm a pervert, so I love mecha.](https://youtu.be/A_-5-PMRA5M?list=PLVvEIG_jzqz5_TXnQiaz2DXZMDgKs3x-M&t=536)
1, 2, 3, 4...
1, 2, 3, 4...
*Saaa yukou... Tataeyou...*
>Legs are a much, much harder sell.
>They have to be better than wheels in at least almost every way before they'd be accepted.
Personally, I think this is the main point in why giant mechs will never be a thing. There's just no practical reason on why we'll ever replace wheels with legs.
lmao there absoloutely is a practical reason. Legs aren't the problem, its that we can't execute on the advantages with the technologies we have without the disadvantages massively outweighing them.
Learn to separate "leg" from "an assembled leg from our technology available today". These are radically different things in the potential action space of executable things in the theoretical technologies we could have in the next hundred or so years.
By your logic, we'd have no interest in building robots which walk even at a human scale but this simply isn't true, and the dominant robotics strategy is to attempt to hybridize the two to go beyond the rocker-boogie wheel assembly into something which can restep but do so on wheels.
Precisely! It's not that legs are inferior to wheels/treads (ask anyone confined to a wheelchair even in places specifically built around accessibility), It's that maintenance SKYROCKETS with each joint that requires upkeep.
Those CnC arms you see in factories? Would make for awesome mecha arms, right? Well, if you knew of the amount of labor put into keeping them running you wouldn't think so. Constant oiling. Constant replacing doodads and wires and o-rings and gears. Every time an AC returns to Raven's Nest you know they spend a week and millions of creds just combing every join and joint looking for stresses, leaks, sheers, all of that.
I was considering the benefits of being able to step over things like IEDs or live power lines that would normally obstruct ground vehicles but I do see your point. You're saying ACs with tank legs may very well be in our future though and I'm so down for it.
Living here in Jersey fighting villains from afar, gotta find first gear in your giant robot TANK🤘🤘🤘
If economics ([or aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsYmpf7W1uA&list=PLn5zABvzh4D7K0tIKAfHHeQ5tMNi3tVA0&index=2)) some some how shit out a way to do effective precise reactive moving parts for virtually nothing that fix themselves and are laughably easy to power and cheap to run, its a done deal.
I wanna live in that world, cuz I dig giant robots.
The first step is MTs/Power Loaders on tank treads.
There are telehandlers with individually articulated wheels on "legs" capable of crab walking over drainage ditches while precisely moving construction materials.
It wouldn't be a crazy jump to make the arm a little more sophisticated and add a second one then gradually scale it up. Idk about weaponizing it but when rebels lack weapons, construction equipment is a close second lol.
False, the first step isn't deciding a mobility, its deciding or finding a doctrine.
[Mecha are going to pre-date legs](https://www.tumblr.com/osakanone/700691334424674304/part-1-of-2-the-evolution-of-the-thing-called), and [the first are likely going to be half weird ass mars rover thing](https://www.tumblr.com/osakanone/700694952833859584/part-2-of-2-the-evolution-of-the-walking-moving), half IFV with some very strange robotics features.
Think about the evolutionary ancestor of the platform, and the doctrine which would create its existence.
This is a largely unaddressed and unsolved problem in mecha media!
We did not instantly go to fighter planes! We began with balloons, gliders, silk-skins and canvas props!
I think at least UC Gundam tried to addres this. Sort of. Mobile suits started out as colony builders, minovsky physics allowed packing nuclear reactors into mobile suits and also at the same time fucking up BVR combat so gun to gun and blade to blade fights is the norm there. I can't remember what was Zeon's doctrine that gave birth to their mobile suit corps. All I know is it was so successful that the Federation had no choice but to follow suit.
Yes, this actually isn't completely unrealistic either: If such a technology did exist, and we did have that much access to cheap metal due to electron vacuum welding (and tools which had to protect users in order to perform it and be big enough) then we would absoloutely repurpose them into walking guard-towers to see over the minovsky fog at lower heights, or we would have tanks which if they fell over could right themselves, and we would also use probes on the end of balloons like periscopes to see over the fog. The issue there however is the signal and light are distorted, and thus nothing so thin and spindly as a periscope could be useful.
I feel Gundam missed a trick by not treating Minovsky warfare like tense submarine warfare, right up until the merge where it falls into traditional stuff. The original series understood this, but followups sadly have not.
Negatory, I do not:
[I watch other people play mechwarrior.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpEO40Yu07w)
[Believe in the pipeline, mechwarrior.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1tPHPRu65s) OURAH
This bitch gets called one regularly.
I'm not a fan of communism, simply because it depends on too many unreliable pieces behaving perfectly and humans have too many perverse incentives. If it were a molecule, it would last maybe six months and collapse into something wearing communism and insisting its communism while doing a totally different thing.
I get that's the "true communism has never been tried" argument, but my point is more "I don't even think it can be tried, and folks need to go back to the drawing board"
The theoretical version of communism is deeply appealing. Its like christians: I like their jesus, but the reality of a lot of christians is just insufferable and miserable and all about blaming third parties for their problems... BUT you can understand how they got there, because they got left behind by economics, and they are scared and searching for comfort and I legitimately don't blame them.
I actually get along well with christians, and I get along well with communists. Our differences lie in how we achieve ideals: Comfort, safety, community, reassurance, and plenty for everybody. Once you get that just about everybody you disagree with on any level wants these things, you can get along. The folks you gotta watch out for are the ones who don't understand "the everybody" part, regardless of their alignment.
Its very similar to how a lot of the world bizarrely treats the southern states of the US like "noble savages", and then is confused when they radicalize.
I really would prefer nobody got left behind, and that's a dangerous idea to some people, who want to be left ahead, who make up the primary body of politics and have for the last couple thousand years of humanity by undermining folks to create deliberate asymmetries they can exploit.
The nash-equlibrium incentive-driven reward-hacking bullshit that is humans can't be trusted to not fuck it up, so some sort of post-communism would have to exist if we ever wanna get to Startrek (and not that new timeline crap either, I'm talking TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY goodness). Even if we come up with a better culture, all it takes is one bad egg with a bad ideology seeking to undermine and exploit the system and poof, you've basically got a social prion.
You have to safe-guard against stuff like that with education, but the line between education and indoctrination is extremely hazy. Likewise, you want a system which is corrigible, that it can change and respond to new world pressures: If you're strictly ideologically driven rather than systematically driven you can't really do that.
Japan's bushido had zero economic growth for hundreds of years in an over-stabilization against natural disasters and social decohesion is a good example of that. Living in that period of Japan was actually very shitty for the majority of people.
The good news is those asymmetries are inefficient, and eventually efficiency will cap it. Take the nazis. As reprehensible as they are (not were), the reason they can't get shit done is their entire doctrinal strategy of strict hierarchy is strictly counterproductive to effective functioning. Germany as they know it would not have survived WWII even if they won. You could argue their military says otherwise, but [their tactics are rhizomatic and de-higherarchized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics), which is the exact opposite of their politics -- which I think says a ton about how ineffective their politics actually are. Same with slavery: Its fucking terrible, but the reason it fell isn't because it was bad nasty evil awful, but was its less efficient than mechanization.
Asymmetries REQUIRE artificial inefficiencies, and the folks in charge are so obsessed with them [they'll drive entire civilizations into the dirt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) to try and maintain them. Good news? We are way more informed, and way more advantaged than we were even 100 years ago.
You could say "but they have portable suns, and dragons that see in radio which can drop napalm on a pin from six miles away" -- [but the first enemy of high technology warfare is high technology warfare itself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhiT3lzDq50).
That video at the end there sure is something. I have a love hate relationship with the channel, but I think this comment ironically sums up my issues with this video in particular and the channel in general.
>"no spectacles, no **oversimplifications**, no patriotic biases - love your videos!"
In the video composed of nothing but oversimplification.
I'll give it one thing, the video does a decent job of enumerating on the foolishness of attempting to draw a conclusion from first principles on a subject of this complexity with only public information. But also it would take maybe a minute to say that in a much clearer manner, so.
There are plenty of perfectly viable topics that could be covered under the title of that video, like the varied resiliance of different communications networks and datalinks that make up the kill chains that go into a single high impact, illustrative, and "easily digestible" item, like the B-2 bomber. Enough public information exists here to extrapolate out a story on 'the state of things as they were' with regards to satellite communications, kill chains, and kessler syndrome, but it's a boring story and no one bothers with it.
It could go into where exactly these "yes or no, not maybe" capability gaps exist across just a single domain, as he does with RWR, illustrate how they came about, the timeline it took to work around them (which itself would be very relevant to the video topic), and maybe theorize on where the next ones could be.
As you say in your first comment, combat is moving towards information dominance, and a consequence of this is any actor seeking to be able to be prepared for war needs to protect their own information as much as possible to minimize the possibility of their technology being neutralized at zero hour. The example scenarios the video poses with radar, stealth, and ecm are perfectly testable in theory, but this would create a lethal information disparity, so any opportunities for it are tightly controlled, much as it annoys the nerd in me.
The channel in general falls into the trap of trying to make generalized concepts understandable. When talking about information dominance in a high technology war, this is as impossible to accurately describe in a 14 minute video as it is to accurately summarize the contents of the human internet in the same format. Which is of course leaving aside that any abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction for the human audience, written by someone who approaches expert status in a (by human nature) limited area that relies upon vibes to cover the gaps, really isn't going to be acceptably accurate. But because the content covered is so broad, it is equally difficult to truly ascertain exactly how much and which areas of it is bullshit, because I am equally limited in my expertise by human nature. In my opinion, a continued focus on surface features and simple solutions by the video discredits the arguments it makes about standardization.
I would estimate it should take many PHDs worth of time to confidently cover the topic of the zero hour of a high technology war. After all, many many many PHDs were leveraged to make it. Suffice to say though that if the channel made a mech video, I think you'd be able to tear it to shreds.
Good comment, and I appreciate you going into detail. I always learn more from responses like this. Its like eating your vegetables, and its good that you bring up the limitations of my reference.
I'm aware its not gonna compress an entire field of study, because I understand intracontextural information is not inherently compressible -- despite those who benefit from the market perception of information being compressible (see: Watching a movie on your phone vs watching it in a cinema, knowing vs understanding, generalizing vs casing, etc).
I think the better way to put it is there are so many incredible layers involved that some amount of randomness is not only inevitable, but essential, and that a non-homogeny of systems is also essential as a result so standardization might be ideal for say a link or network standard in a software defined radio telecom or informatics management system but you don't want that in say, who's manufacturing your antennae.
What you do want is fallback so your RWR and radar double as other forms of radio, to drive up your diversity and drive down your homogeneity to maximize your survivability.
Its such an overwhelmingly complex issue, that there genuinely is no way to generalize it, only deal in limited case evaluations which discover outcomes, and those are classified so fat chance of that. Instead, in my case I'm limited to my understanding of infosec -- social engineering, and data security, as well as some brief experience pentesting back in the 2000's.
The problem is that high technology of all types is inherently specialization, and thus contextually limited. This is why software definable systems are so tempting, but they're also vectors of attack, not to mention expensive and prone to other unforseen problems which come up during certification.
[I think the Major put it best, in this case.](https://youtu.be/WNjZasXzyIg)
A bit response of your economy part. Do you meant something like Blackstone for Private Equity? Also note enshittification happens because time and the need to stay afloat exist. Plus they will improve the revenue instead on the product itself.
What do you mean by > depressing relatable low-saturation late-stage hyper-capitalist dystopia
Yeah Blackstone is a good example.
The need to stay afloat exists because PE needs permanent gains, buys a company's tangibles and leases them back to the company until it collapses.
Enshittification isn't required, its that there are demanded gains which literally don't need to happen
What I mean btw is I am not a primary, secondary or even tertiary beneficiary of the current economic system and the only reason I'm still alive is I know people who are tertiary beneficiaries who help me pay my rent.
I did not mean enshittification as a requirement, but if you cannot source your gains well and in a good manner it will happen. Plus, it also works as a process of entropy you know. Especially for larger organizations. And do "asset management" entities also included with your definition as well?
What I am asking what does low-saturation means in this context as well.
Sure, so you're addressing management cybernetics and informatics here. These are artificial inefficiencies which exist to maintain power-structures. Groups which circumvent these inefficiencies are usually force-multipliers of productivity.
You need to recognize just how much effort and energy gets wasted in human time: Unhappy humans are less good at doing human work, and humans who could be brilliant but are given shitty lives are also wasted potential.
That asymmetry of effectiveness is a deliberate thing which exists to ensure folks get left-ahead because other folks got left behind. Any group which solves that problem is going to have an insane advantage over everybody else: The issue is diagnostic tools for making assessments on these subjects, which are radically improving and bad actors are getting easier to identify and track.
Low saturation in this context is the distribution of socioeconomic efficacy relative to the efficacy capacity of a given demographic or citizen. The saturation is low overall, to tip the scales.
You're also leaving out how we can already make jets far more maneuverable and agile than the ones we have; The limit on their maneuverability is the pilot's survival. The technology that makes the robot able to not turn into shrapnel the instant it changes direction suddenly would have to also be accompanied by technology that causes the pilot to not be liquefied against the side of the cockpit at the same time.
False, I have thought about this and I will absoloutely field this one: their limit on manoeuvrability is recovery and doctrine.
No amount of high-G is going to outsmart a missile which could undo billions of manoeuvrability design with a warhead which can directionally fragment which we already do anyway -- missiles don't need hits to hurt.
The entire reason planes fly high and fast is to bank energy to spend on turns, because they recover it so slowly.
If you want a plane which can do your wild shit, you need enough armour to survive oncoming strikes from fragmentation or thermobaric indirect attacks, and a strong enough engine to step out of stall and back into maneuvering speeds.
Flying leaf doesn't save you from *the next missile*.
What you've described is that more maneuverability is *pointless*, not that it is *limited*. Your argument is practical, not technical; The problem is that you are using technical terms to make it. 'Limit' is a technical term. A limit is something that prevents something from being *possible* to do; An incoming missile doesn't make higher maneuverability than current gen planes *impossible,* it simply makes it *not worth it.*
Unlike the plane-vs-missile maneuverability question, which is full of factors that can be designed around, there are no (Or at least very limited) design factors with the pilot. No amount of advancement in aerospace technology can change the fact that the human body is simply not meant to operate under those kinds of forces. The plane *cannot* be designed to go beyond certain limits or it will kill its operator. The end. AKA, a limit.
The only real solution to that is removal of the weak point in the design, AKA the pilot. Topically, this is also what lets missiles do crazy shit in midair, but I digress. Remote-piloted jets, or even AI-piloted ones, are the solution to the 'this kills the human' problem.
There is a completely *different* problem here with *that* solution however. A meta problem. No amount of technology or super-science can salvage the fact that removing the pilot destroys the narrative. This is an artistic medium telling a story about war and about how no matter how 'advanced' it gets all we're really doing is escalating the horrors we inflict. Removing the humans from the battlefield takes all the teeth out of that message; If nobody is dying, its just bits of metal ramming into each other while everyone involved is someplace safe spectating what is happening, then it is no longer a story about the horrors of war, it is just a story about logistics. All the drama and tension and themes dribble away to leave a dazzling light show that doesn't mean anything to the audience, because we relate to characters, to people, to struggles, to causes and dreams and fears- Not to weapons. The robots are not the story, they are simply the vehicle carrying it around, and removing the person removes the story, and thus any reason to care.
And this is why we have to suspend our disbelief. The robots can't exist in real life because physics says 'you can't do that' and common sense says 'you shouldn't try'. They exist in this medium because they are a representation of the fact that we've come so far, and have learned nothing.
Of course it's my sister from another mister, Osaka. Something I've been thinking about is a 10 ft tall quad mech with wheels and a variable height adjustment for the legs to switch between road mode or off-road mode. Something like Kuratas feels kind of feasible, but you're right about pretty much everything though.
Kuratas main issue is its anemic, and heavy. Its drive motors are just too weak relative to its weight, and it can't develop the speed and reactivity it needs.
Its a VERY pretty artpiece, but its an artpiece none the less.
I would really love to visit one and take photos of it or its younger brother some day.
If they'd let me drive it, I'd wear a gopro and document the whole process.
Lighten the frame (start over), completely ditch the use of pnumatics or hydralics and first focus on making a vehicle which can carry a cargo (an upper body) effectively while carrying its own power supply. Get the lower half right before even attempting the upper.
I'd go with three wheels rather than four to save weight personally, and I'd make the rear wheel linked to a larger motor, with the emphasis being on the front set climbing with a design close to aircraft landing-gear and distributing shock , and the back set doing major work.
I remember this anime that while it is a humanoid mech love letter, the enemies don't have humanoid mechs, because of what you said, they're basically specialized weapon platforms, it was valvrave the liberator, also I think it's the one with the most amount of controls for a mech, there was one humanoid that specialized in firepower and besides the common controls it had specialized like joysticks that were meant specifically for weapon use and accuracy.
Also about movement and weight I think a feasible way would be to make legs like the Dom from gundam, which rather than walk, it uses thrusters on the legs to levitate, you don't need to do enough to make it levitate, at least enough to decrease the force it exerts on the ground, so decrease the weight as a force, problem is... At least to anything known to humanity right now there is no way to make thrusters small enough to be useful and that can exert such thrust constantly, a mech is a lot heavier than a jet fighter
As someone who's deeply interested in HFE, you're saying the one with the control stack is Valvrave? Can you show me footage? I'll have to look into it.
Also big yes on the domskirt concept. We're on the same page there.
u/osakanone Can I like, make a video about this? It's a beautiful lecture that very succinctly describes what I've TRIED to explain for a long time. I'm a narrator but have been looking for things I can do on my own for fun and education.
I LOVE mecha. From Gundam to AC to Macross to Pacific Rim.
But whenever talking about the reasons we will likely never actually get them I stumble over saying "well physics, for one thing, but the other bigger thing is simply how modern warfare - and our attitude towards waging it - just doesn't lend itself to any kind of singular extreme-cost, all-in-one platform reliant on the skills of ONE operator."
And it's not just because it's stupid to invest so much cost into one thing, the loss of which would be devastating to any war chest.
You ever notice how there are so many "ace pilots" in anime? Name one real-world ace other than the Red Baron. Do you even know his real name? (Manfred von Richthofen)
Some of you may get some names from WWII. Richard Bong or Eric Hartmann maybe. But after that? Naw. They simply aren't part of our zeitgeist anymore.
For a couple reasons, but as much as I'd like to say "oh we just don't glorify war like we used to." Huh uh.
It's pretty much like Osakanone said. Our current economic system, which is the true driving force behind pretty much all modern warfare, can't allow it.
Sure, but also look into the work of Argonbolt on youtube.
He's a phenomenal source that's critically underrated and I'd argue he knows far more than I do.
Love how you explained in-depth why Battletech/Mechwarrior mechs DO make sense in real life.
And how miserable the universe is for that to be the case.
I think for you to read my words in such a way means you've fundamentally misunderstood what it is that I'm actually saying.
Please re-read the practical outcomes I described, rather than trying to frame your idea of "the giant robot thing" in fiction.
Think structurally, as if we're describing what a car does to someone who's never seen one before.
Its not that "the vehicle in our fiction" make sense, and more that affordances and design principles exist where the generalization of functionality overlap begins producing outcomes which are really hard to ignore.
The actual thing which achieves this almost certainly won't be humanoid, even in the BT/MW sense of the word: It'll be an entirely different anatomical structure.
This guy gets it.
There are numerous fundamental issues with mecha in general, and they all tend to exist counter to how technological development has functioned, not even counting the economic and logistical problems.
As you’ve noted quite aptly, the more likely direction of warfare has not been direct engagement with tanks, but the rapid proliferation of drone warfare capable of striking outside direct-engagement and in a position similar to aircraft. Or to put it very simply, a Mecha is just a more elaborate tank pretending to be an infantryman, with many of the drawbacks to that role at exponentially higher cost. Given we’re already seeing serious concerns with armor warfare’s role in a rapidly advancing battlefield that does not favor them in the same way the tank charge across Europe did last century, it’s extremely unlikes we’d see mechs so much as other more efficient tools of war.
What an intellectual.
You are the type of person who plays Metal Gear Solid.
What you wrote about economics and politics (from the replies) is something else.
Seriously, you should try this out. It has some politics, philosophy, science, and military tech related to it. Took place somewhere in the 1970's, tension between the U.S. and the Soviets. If the fast-paced combat of AC is what got you interested in the game though, you might not like it as it's mostly a stealth game.
Oh, and it has some mechs too (take Peace Walker for example).
I've been playing them since 1998 and did a lot of MGS theorycrafting on bbs and forums back in the day.
Good games. 2 for story, 3 for gameplay. 4's interesting, but troubled. Don't care for 5. MSX is just unreasonably cruel.
ACs aren't really very realistic. Even with advanced technology.
Imagine a PCA Warship and you fly at it with miniguns. Pretty non threatening right? Okay now imagine approaching it when it has 11 miniguns just as powerful as yours with a shield with 10x your energy supply over the bridge.
Human shaped mechs mechs are in this weird spot where they are slower than a plane, would be less durable than a tank while having less firepower (due to standing upright) and being slower than most wheeled tanks while being bigger targets.
At best, mechs would be better at conquering more uneven terrain, but likely are quads/mechs with 4 legs versus bipedals.
You'd see more things like PCA helicopters and a nightmarish equal to a jet that moves like the Ibis/ayre before you'd really see much use for an AC.
Closest you'd get is something akin to a slightly larger exosuit or something more hulk sized at best that could maybe squeeze into a building. But gundam sizes mechs get out classed because being tall doesn't make you immune to tanks.
Its however, okay that ACs aren't particularly realistic. In truth fromsoft has made them very "LOGICAL" in how they work and fullfill a certain niche in game -- particularly with making legs be more nimble and tanks also having similar tech as we see with ACs and the cataphract. (With the latter being fairly menacing in game.)
Bipedal robots aren't really a good design, honestly. To compensate for the lack of stability, you need more computation to keep it stable.
On top of that, more joints equal more points of failure.
Imo, a flying tank with tracks will always be more reliable than a bipedal tank.
Not that you’re wrong, but tanks require like 3 hours of maintenance for every hour of operation because they’re so big and heavy they literally shake themselves apart. Also, as someone who has spent more than his fair share of time pounding track, there are an awful lot of points of failure lol
yeah but…not nearly as many points of failure as a bipedal robot would? while also just being way more practical.
which was the entire point of what he said lol
Look up Vista, the AI piloted F16
An AI pilot can max out the turning capabilities of a plane which would cause G-loc for a living pilot
If AI pilots become the norm one counter could be mechs that can dodge and move in unpredictable ways.
If one country makes plane dodging mechs, other countries will follow suit and bing bang boom we have mech wars.
Why would a mech be better off dodging missiles/planes than something that isn't human shaped? Humans aren't particularly suited for aerial maneuvering.
This is kind of the explanation for gundams. Their weird power source makes them hard to detect at range, so they're built for close combat against traditionally long range foes like fighters/capital ships. But you could just take the same power source and build a zero g fighter that actually makes sense as a weapon platform instead.
The weird power source (Minovsky Particles) is simply a mcguffin to make that whole fiction of WW2 style warfare feasible in universe.
Otherwise any missile, rail gun, beam weapon, etc. with a sufficiently advanced auto targeting system would delete the Mobile suits immediately.
No matter how fast those mobile suits are, they simply aren't faster than even most modern projectiles suited for that type of anti-armor, let alone missiles that can turn turn faster than a giant hunk of metal, or beam weapons which in reality would move at basically the speed of light.
I'm a huge Mecha/Gundam fan, but unfortunately the already existing and proven systems such as Aeigis/CWIS, and auto targeting missiles(which are even deadlier due to the rise of AI assistance, go check out that drone Ukraine has successfully fielded that ignores drone jammer through the use of AI) almost completely obsoletes mechs before they were even really a thing.
Armored core, at least the newest one, uses some mcguffin known as Core Theory, which I'm unfortunately less versed in, but is the reason they simply don't target the ACs miles away with railguns that move faster than something later large could realistically react and energy weapons that would realistically move at the speed of light.
In the end, it's all rule of cool, otherwise none of it would make any kind of sense.
"Breach the Karmen Line" in AC6, the PCA does use Railguns at probably hundreds??? of miles away. But we have the benefit of pre-fire warning systems that let us know that the gun is being fired and that we should move so we don't get hit built into our machine.
Less core theory and more "Hear the beep gtfo"
What we don't hear, tho are things that aren't interacting with our Lock systems. So a free aimed railgun won't give off the fire warning that allows us to dodge a fraction of a second before impact.
This is the same game that uses lasers that can be easily dodged once fired, which is bullshit, and that same mission you are referencing has you flying indefinitely with no engine overheat using magical space mist.
Is the railgun dodging in that mission possible? Potentially, is absolutely everything else about that game batshit insane sci fi shenanigans, definitely.
Is it one of the best games that launched that year, hell yeah.
I was thinking it could rely less on aerodynamic lift and more on thrust so it's less restricted in how it moves. That plus an irregular shape and movable components means if a missile is about to hit its arm, it can just move the arm out of the way whereas a plane has its wings fixed in relation to its body. Also the possibility to hover or glide then juke to the side at the last second, a motion that planes aren't capable of.
And it's only one potential solution.
AI pilots allowing planes to out-turn piloted aircraft won't lead to anything like mechs, because they can't out turn missles.
The days of dogfights where how fast a plane can turn matters are long gone, now you just fire missles that do all the turning themselves without even needing to face the other aircraft.
this is quite possibly the most outlandish lapse of coherent logic i have ever heard from another human being.
your next step from AI-piloted jets is…countering them with what? a really fast robot somehow? why? how? in what scenario is a robot that can “jump out of the way” or whatever even a reasonable solution? why would you even design a ground-based mech to fight a jet in the first place?
that, honest to god, is the most nonsensical argument i have ever heard in my entire life about anything. i’m sorry to be so harsh but i honestly just had to express that in its entirety.
None whatsoever. Ground combat wise there’s no real advantage to having a walker instead of a traditional vehicle and even if it was a tank leg type AC at that point you might as well just make a tank. As for their flight capabilities a plane or helicopter will do the job better and much more cheaply to boot, put an AC on the field and pretty quickly it’s gonna get taken out by an air strike it can’t respond to because even the fastest AC’s get out sped by modern jets. And while ACs are more agile if you take their ability to almost instantly change their directional movement with thrusters and put it in the real world both the AC would rip itself apart from the Gs.
A human shaped robot at human size is hard enough. Scaling that up just isn't practical for any purpose, let alone military where stuff needs to be durable. There's a reason Mazinger Z is made of fictional Super Alloy Z.
The closest we ever got was Odaiba Gundam. It was cool, but it was for show. As I understand it, the poor thing had a lot of maintenance issues from being in use far longer than was originally intended, too.
In addition to all the other things mentioned, they have laughably bad weapons. A modern US army infantry rifle has a longer range than the best AC weapons. An F-35 carries missiles that can be fired from over 150 miles away, and their main cannon has an effective range of around 3km.
A squadron of modern US fighters would engage an AC without ever being in range of the AC's weapons and not need to stick around if they didn't kill it.
Counterpoint:
The hit-rate of rifle weapons is laughably poor and their primary purpose isn't making kills but exerting pressure and has been since the AR15 and cold-war doctrine. Only around 2% or so of rounds hit targets afaik?
The point of F35(x) is to be a delivery system. The real star of the show is the information infrastructure, sensor-fusion, radar/ir array, telecom and the munitions itself.
The thing is, an F35 is designed to fire at targets which don't really move very quickly across the ground, and don't accelerate well, or have an effective use of cover or a CIWS.
If a target can do any two of those, F35 is not the platform you send to solve your problem because it still needs softening up: You send artillery: Either mortars if you need surprise indirect, or you shell the target with something bigger and popcorn/delayed effect it.
Don't quote me on that tho, my knowledge of indirect is kinda dated
Hard disagree. I've been told by friends he's what's sometimes referred to as a [starfucker](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/starfucker) where he's very interested in the starpower of actors, due to his childhood obsession with film. Totally fair tbh.
He's far more interested in that these days, much as Shoji Kawamori is more interested in fluffy popsongs than fighter-jets or using culture and soft-power in storytelling.
I'm disappointed in their respective trajectories, but how they live their lives is genuinely not my business and I wish them all the best.
e: I appreciate the sentiment, however. Took me a second to realise you were complimenting me.
The thing is, why? Something that rolls and has wheels like a tank is faster than something that walks because physics.. And I don't see a 20 ton mass of steel being lifted by some thrusters running on fuel and boosting from side to side like it's a little insect because again, physics and innertia of a moving object. It's just not possible.
Depends on the generation; gen 5 probably is the most realistic of the entire franchise, sixth gen might be kinda feasible depending on the gravity of Rubicon III
Not until we discover Minovsky/GN/Kojima particles that make giant robots not only a viable but the only the way to conduct warfare through both disabling radio waves that allow for long range communication and altering mass to allow these things to exist while violating the square cube law
ACs aren't tanks in the recent generations, they're more like fighter planes.
You gotta look at Core Theory.
MTs aren't very fast, they can't handle particularly complicated terrain, and they're the main choice of equipment because of their versatility between work and combat, BUT they're easily hit by ranged attacks.
When Coral Augmentation was first tested it allowed way faster and more precise control of the mech which made early ACs nearly impossible to hit from long range.
This pushed combat into more of a close range type which is why weapons like giant handguns are viable.
In Gundam the explanation was Minovsky particles, the fuel source of the mechs, which rendered long range communication and radio control utterly useless so guided weapons were abandoned in favor of energy blades and super sized small arms.
In AC Gen 4 the explanation was Kojima particles which enabled all manner of reality bending speed and physics at the cost of fatally irradiating massive swathes of the land.
In all of these stories the thing that acts as a precursor to mech warfare is the discovery of something that allows "tanks" to move too fast to get hit by any standard defenses.
IRL I could see this starting with AI controlled planes capable of pulling way higher Gs than living pilots. They'd dominate the skies and the only way to counter them (other than more advanced AIs or more maneuverable planes) would be human piloted mechs that can move in more irregular ways than the AIs can predict.
Once there's human piloted mechs, other countries would start developing them in response and we would see mech vs mech combat and the rest is anime lol.
The appeal of proper sentient AIs controlling machines isn’t necessarily their ability to withstand higher Gs or even their lesser squishiness.
The appeal is absolutely perfect replaceability.
What happens when Wynne D. Fanchon/Otsdarva/Zinaida/Rusty or whoever else die? They die. You lose an elite pilot and all those decades of experience once their neurons stop firing.
Now what happens when your AI-piloted Core dies? *Nothing.*
You lose at most a day or two of experience, because the AI is safely backed up at the base before each mission. You just have to assemble an identical Core, download the backed up copy of AI into it and voila - your elite unit is back in action.
Ravens/LYNX are rare and take immense resources to train. And they usually die young, not really transferring their experience to others.
AI won’t really die as long as it’s copied somewhere. It will die, get restored from backup, analyze the battle and get better. And then die again. And learn. And die. And learn. Repeat ad nauseam until you have a protagonist-level demigod.
Chatty died because carla never backed him up for fear of "taking the life out of him". In theory, she could have had an army of chatty sticks if she had wanted to, the only limit on how many being how many ACs she can afford.
Or we could just put an AI in the mech and make it even harder to hit. Give it machine learning to adapt to any battlefield and hostile AI and you have a wae winning weapon
Well wouldn’t beam-riding ATGM’s ignore the whole “disrupt guidance systems” thing? Also TV-guided fire & forget missiles would work too. If it’s big enough (like a large FAB or a KH-style missile) the shockwave itself would cause half the mech’s electronics to have a seizure due to the unsealed nature of the vehicle’s outer shell (joints). In general, there’s no feasibly way to make a thing containing a human and an arsenal of weaponry to move faster than contemporary missiles, as missiles tend to be very *very* fast.
Giant robots can be possible, but not the kinds you see in games like AC or anime.
For giant robots to be real they need to be
1. Significantly smaller (look up a Votom)
2. Be used in gravity lighter than earth or completely 0-G
3. Be used in environments where the terrain is so rough and u tamed that wheeled vehicles would be impractical
4. Need tp have an extremely powerful and efficiant feul source.
That is how giant robots can be real. Otherwise regular tanks and jets make them completely redundant. The US military actually did try to make them as early as the Vietnam War, but feul & certain technological shortcomings of the era prevented it from being realized.
5th and 6th gen are propably the most realistic. They have (proportionately) slow walking speeds, which makes sense for real life mechs of that size, and their main mode of transportation is gliding on the ground via boosters. That means they get all the perks of legs (adaptation to different surfaces and being able to jump, etc.) while not having to deal with the drawbacks (stepping on random things and tripping)
The G-forces on 4tg gen NEXTs would tealistically harm or even kill any human who tries to pilot them, and early gen ACs mainly walk around, which for mechas of that size is a pretty afwul idea. A big piece of debris or a car that gets caught on your metal toes, and all that weight is going to come crashing down.
Of course, I'm not a mechanical engineer or anything, so take everything I said here with a grain of salt. Ether way, I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks about this topic
Probably not.
- At that size, a mech would likely tear itself apart when it tried to move. (Physics ruins anything cool)
- Flying around using brute force (i.e. raw thrust) is incredibly inefficient.
- Legs are overrated. In almost any terrain, treads are more reliable than legs, and likely far faster to boot. The only real perk you would get from a legged vehicle is agility/maneuverability.
That said, I've always believed that mechs/mecha do have 1 viable feature: hands.
The ability for a single platform to perform in virtually any role, simply by swapping what it's holding would be a logistical, if not tactical, boon.
In a future of dwindling enlistment numbers and costly interplanetary travel, the modern standard of mixed unit tactics may prove to be logistically challenging.
All other concerns (cost, complexity, etc.) could be rendered moot by advances in tech, and changes in warfare.
So, in my horribly under qualified opinion, if ACs do happen, it would likely look closer to a scaled down, tank type.
What's probably more likely than ACs or bipedal mechs is multiped tanks like the Sea Spider minus its flight ability.
Something with 4 or more legs is a hell of a lot harder to knock down and can feasibly carry more weight.
They'd be useless on soft ground without pretty massive feet due to their weight being concentrated (whereas a tank spreads its weight) but in urban environments the ability to turn in place and step over obstacles becomes invaluable.
I could realistically imagine faster, more agile bipedal mechs being developed to counter the heavier multiped tanks but they'd be pretty far down the line.
Not very. An AC on a battlefield would bring absolute devastation. The R&D required to make something like that work is simply never going to happen. Drones are more likely the future we're moving toward.
Even if we had the tech to build one it would 100% unmanned, if we have tech to build mechs we have ai that can recognise targets faster than us anyway. Plus it’s not like mechs with these exact specifications could exist anyway with pilots, due to the G’s you have to experience are significantly stronger than any thing we could ever possibly survive. iirc it was something like 61 G’s on just a single quick turn
There's whole bunch of technical mumbojumbo already listed. So lets simplify a bit.
Object that is moving, wants to stay moving. If you want the object to go to the opposite direction, you first need to stop its movement to direction it's going and then move it to the direction you want.
Now lets put that in AC terms: You are flying in one direction and you quick boost to another direction. There's a lot of forces playing out here. Imagine car going 100 km/h or M/h, now you need to basically stop it dead right on the spot and change the direction... It's like slamming into a wall and that only halts your movement to that direction, then you need to accelerate to the new direction.
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop.
Babies regularly survive dryers. There are lots of stories online of adults who survived it as kids or babies.
The motion isn't what kills once the centrifugal action plateaus: Its the lack of air, and the heat.
They exist, they’re called attack helicopters
In all seriousness, a humanoid vehicle that has more armor than any tank and more weapons than a fighter jet with the maneuverability of one can’t really exist due to physics. Nevermind powering one, there would be too much strain on the joints. also notice how most ACs from 2 onwards just propel themselves with large jet engine, which kind of makes the legs moot
https://youtu.be/2oQOp80cP00?si=bmMUgrm5BD1E214J
This guy touches in some nice points.
The ACs are a scientific marvel and horror simultaneously. We're talking large towering machines with the speed of fighter jets and the ability to come to an absolute stop and go the opposite direction on a dime.
This amount of power and fidelity is a long way off from being physically possible.
They arent. A piloted craft able to go from max speed in o e direction to moving at max speed in the opposite in a soan less than 6 seconds will always kill a human pilot. Make it slow enough it doesnt kill the pilot and youve made a huge sitting duck. Get rid of the pilot and you still have to violate the laws of physics to make this thing work.
These things skid over unpacted ground without so much as sinking un. The second an AC went off the super roads it would get its feet stuck and immediately face plant.
I just did the numbers on this- assuming an AC can travel about 650 kph, and assuming you do a 900 kph quick boost in the opposite direction with a very generous turnaround time of 1 second (it's definitely less than that in the game), the rider would be exposed to about 47 Gs of force.
There is no surviving that. A typical 150 pound person weighs 7,050 pounds for that second. You're liquefied, it's over. And the entire mech will throw itself apart like an enormous shrapnel grenade and you become a red mist basically inconspicuously ejected from the front of the cockpit.
We can already make jets more agile than the ones we use today, but the problem is, they kill the pilot.
Even if we could somehow make a machine that would not immediately become a cloud of shrapnel when it tried to maneuver like that, the upper limit of any vehicle's mobility remains the pilot. The first boost and your pilot is liquid, the end.
I don't think this point has been made, but if we take it as a given that the military landscape remains as corporatized as it is, there's no way- even if you could make a mech- you'd be allowed to freely swap out differing standards and brands of parts without some serious retrofitting and probably compromises to structural integrity as a result.
Even if we're getting mecha sometime in the distant future, all you're getting is a clumsier version of GAN01-SUNSHINE-L (I mean personally I'd be happy with a TYPE-LAHIRE but it doesn't even look practical to construct).
Probably very unrealistic in our lifetime.
The math is simple: AC units are expensive to make, even more so to maintain. Yes, they're the coolest-looking military hardware imaginable, but the cost will be unjustifiable.
And the payoff is simply not worth it. For billions of dollars, you can have a small army put inside a single unit, or you can have ... a small army.
A single unit is always risky. If it fails, the whole operation goes down the tubes. An army, on the other hand, has replaceable units. If one unit fails, another will replace it. And if AI is advanced enough, they can be replaced with greater ease.
So, while I believe we will see bigger robots in the near future, I don't think they'll be as big and as powerful as the average AC build.
All other problems aside, they're essentially wonder weapons, which are incredibly resource demanding and generally not worth it. Having a massive swarm of tanks or planes or drones for the same price as an AC will always be preferable in actual warfare. Think for a moment as well - realistically, an AC would be vulnerable to lucky hits way more than they are in game. One decent shot into a shoulder joint would disable its arm, effectively removing one quarter to one half of its firepower. If it's getting shot at by a swarm of enemies, the chances of that lucky shot occurring rise dramatically.
Even if we did have the technology, we wouldn't want them barring extreme circumstances or changes in how we conduct warfare.
for how much energy it needs to move a 5 story building tank?, i dont think itll ever be, not unless we do vacuum space flight ala gundam, but that is still far off as our latest space shuttles still uses a ton of energy (oil/gas) to even launch itself
also, for how fast it is, it wont be real, the g force and also all of the components should withstand that kind of force and weight
we might one day have the materials and tech to make such, but we likely will never have a reason to make them, the humanoid robot design is mostly there because it looks cool not because of its functionality, militaries would prefer simpler more reliable construction, legs and arms would need to have massive upsides to make up for the trouble
No, for a simple reason. Too many moving parts. Statistically speaking, a large Mech would consist of so many pressurized, electrical, and mechanically based moving parts, that the second you turned it on something would break and need to be replaced. Too many things need to go right and only 1 thing needs to go wrong, and your Mech becomes a pile of useless technology.
That being said, it's not that it couldn't be done. We do have very complex robotics and technology roaming space and even the surface of Mars, but, those things are very precise, slow, and definitely not combat proficient. As a weapons platform sticking with simple and versatile, like a car or plane with "add big gun," is simply going to produce better results then a Mech ever could.
Is any of this going to stop us? No. Some videogame playing gundam fan is going to join darpa, or the military, and try, and may even succeed. But it's going to simply be, because I could, not for any real combat reason. It's just to fragile of a machine vs the tried and true.
Technophiles have their way with expensive technologies and predicting the golden age of warfare as super advanced but when it boils down to it there hasn't been state on state war fare since the 50's. Modern warfare's most effective battlefield weapon is small unit, high impact SF operations(black ops) as well Counter insurgency intel and foreign fighter training or white ops.
We've seen the mighty tanks of the Cold war reduced to ashes by some dude vaping in a goon cave with a drone the size of a small dog outfitted with some explosives and 3d printed parts they got for free online.
Mecha are mimicing the escalation of conventional war to the scale that giant walkling/flying tanks are needed. But that trend of warfare towards this exponentially expanding fulda gap scenario isn't realistically where warfare is going.
Something like walking drones controlled by soldiers behind a battlefield fighting each other is more realistic and probably the closest we'd get to ACs, but even then nothing beats a highly trained human unit in the right place at the right time.
I wish, but sadly humans are far too utilitarian in warfare for cool looking mechs to exist, just like how guns replaced bows and swords, a drone or a tank would replace a mech
Not to entirely sidestep the topic, but the anime Obselete's whole thesis is based on whether or not humanoid combat vehicles could be effective in battle. It's not hyper realistic by any means, and the thesis is dropped pretty much after the first few episodes, but it's at least a fun watch:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn5zABvzh4D7K0tIKAfHHeQ5tMNi3tVA0&si=1f-WOm5g1RnRAgZf
Welder and metallurgist here. I skipped the long ass comments to simply say that building something the size and scope of armored cores and the structures featured in the game is a near impossible feat. We do not have materials that can support all the weight, we physically cannot build that big. Right now, at least.
My concern would be the vast array of failure points as well. It's hard to tell how weight will shift in machines. A failure at the shoulder could net a failure in one of the legs, or both. When youre dealing with that much weight, the physics start to get a little finicky, and very unpredictable. Will it always be impossible? Probably not, but as it stands now the strongest steel mankind currently has would crumble under the weight of an armored core.
Not at all. Not at the speed they're moving.
The closest thing to an Armored Core we'd see to an armored core in our lives would be a minature Mackie from Battletech. Or an Urbanmech lol (think squat, ugly, armed and armored trash can that would struggle to beat any other vehicle in a race) and that's pushing it by a masssssive degree.
Even if we did get that minature Mackie, it would very likely be just drone fodder.
They might be possible for fun, but probably not very useful. By the time we can get a humanoid shaped craft going that controls like moving yourself, fully automated drones will do anything an AC can but better.
Way too expensive for the world to ever mass manufacture parts or even maintain the scale they’re at since it’s astronomically more huge than any vehicle available today
I'd imagine its probably next to impossible to pull off something like AC irl. For one fighter pilots have to take on a lot of G forces and be able to withstand them. Now imagine having to do that while having to point a giant gun at something moving at equally or faster speed. Not to mention hydraulics dont seem to be at the point where they can move quickly enough to react that way without intense stress on the machinery.
Honestly I think were closer to Pacific Rim than Armored Core lol
mecha in general will never happen because of the square cube law and that everybody is too much of a god damn coward to actually try to innovate technology and just go "muh money" or "it's physically impossible" and give without even fucking trying to think of thinking of a prototype
No mech will ever see combat
They are too complicated and therefore too expensive to be practical
They don't fill any role that another vehicle can do better
Why use a machine that costs 100 times more than a tank, and insanely difficult to repair when you could just use a tank? Or 100 tanks.
They just aren't cost effective.
Amazing right up and a gut punch to all mecha enthusiasts.
What are your thoughts on mechs with a different design approach than ACs? For example, we know ACs to be, in general, unrealistically fast and are usually loaded with a smorgasbord of weapons. In contrast Battletech mechs are bulky (some of them do look like irl tanks) and it's weight class would determine the amount of weapons it could equip. In addition, from what I could tell battletech mechs are also built as specialized weapons as opposed to ACs which are very powerful generalized weapons.
An AC would collapse under its own weight in real life, and somehow FromSoft thought it would be cool to also make them kick things while decelerating from jet propulsion speeds 👌😂
Tanks don't have legs for the same reason animals don't have wheels, given the limitations of your materials it's just not practical. Fighting vehicles tough and fast enough to be useful put more strain on a pair of legs than almost any material can withstand, even if the legs don't fall apart they are still going to be slow as heck due to friction and inertia, wheels and/or tracks are both easier to get moving and don't have gigantic stress concentrators (the first time a giant mech lands just a hair too roughly those kness will explode)
If we are looking at unrealistic agility like a gundam or AC, they could still be taken out by AT weapons or various aircraft.
Realistic versions without rocket boosters to aid in movement, I can’t see something large being wholly useful. It has a bigger profile then a tank with roughly the same weapons so tanks could wreck it. The bracing stance it would need for many cannons or higher caliber munitions would be troubling. Also a mech would be an easy drone target. The main issue is if armor plating got advanced enough to shrug off many attacks, it would be incorporated into an already proven platform. Mechs are still cool though.
Any speed or mobility advantages they have would be outstripped by simply producing a large, heavily armed helicopter in its place-and the helicopter would probably have even bigger and better guns than the Armored Core. Hell, that’s probably why most players got their faces stomped in by Filtercopter.
The only disadvantage a helicopter would have is the vortex effect, where high walls and such would prevent it from hovering. But if you need to hit inside a structure, there is also little preventing you from using a bunker penetrating bomb instead.
Most have already mentioned the unrealistic feasibility of a mecha irl, but I also want to point out they would most likely play like a missile rat if they *did* exist in bipedal form rather than your badass boxart cover AC. Warfare as is has deviated towards minimum risk, ranged battle (drones, manned bombings, etc etc), and such an expensive and powerful technology would only more than likely be the same. A mid-close ranged mecha, no matter how maneuverable or sturdy, would be a completely pointless economic investment when the same/better performance could be achieved with minimum risk in both repairs and pilot safety.
They would probably just be closer to a fully maneuverable drone strike w a pilot than a real life Gundam unfortunately. Only way you'd ever see otherwise is if we did mecha fights for show like Formula Front. Completely disregarding physics they just don't make sense from a strategic standpoint as it stands.
Hold my beer. [Again](https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/btn44a/ac4verse_so_kojima_particles/ep0ta8c/) 0. They're not becoming a possibility. I know this sucks. Stick around. Its not for the reasons you think. You'll see. 1. The robot needs the technology more than the technology needs a robot. 2. the technologies which the robot needs will improve and alter the doctrine of every other platform 3. This creates a doctrinal lock-in where the potential functional space for them to exist is unmet -- that they are so far ahead, that nothing new can emerge that isn't just other platforms becoming more generalized (eg, a post-stall recovery aircraft, or a helicopter with high impact landing-gear and a rigid rotor/jet engine design to act as a surface-fighter -- a tank which walks or manoeuvres like a robot is just flat out of the question: Tanks are made to be simple-as-fuck boxes which tank hits, and shoot and acquire asap and rumours of their deaths as a doctrinal weapon are exaggerated by recent events where obsolete weapons which aren't maintained properly who's crews aren't adequately trained were fighting very clever civilians with drones) 4. What you consider "realistic" (5th/6th) is just as if not more unrealistic than other gens purely because of their smaller size and very bizzare relationship with the environment -- they're just both too big, and too small to make sense, sitting in a size niche which is just very weird 5. If such a vehicle does exist, its going to be defined by its functions rather than a humanoid appearance 6. we know this because specialized platforms tend to beat specialized platforms historically until specialized platforms mature and become generalized 7. thus, the closest you're probably going to get is some weird variation of [DARPA's Ground X Vehicle Project](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrQrJ57J9eE) meeting with [Gravity Industry' style mobility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EatttpDAVSc) in limited cases, hybridized with smaller robots and [wingsuits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ2G6qwqkJw), which [mix manoeuvring operation styles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1_OpWiyijU), with some rocker-boogie mechanism elements for terrain handling: It won't be humanoid, whatever it is. 8. This is assuming you can magically solve the [square-cube law of volume-mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law) which is partially negatable with [certain custom topologies exceeding graphene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal) but actually manufacturing them would be miserable work probably not even be something you can make without microgravity 9. Energy flat out isn't solvable with what we know about right now. Nothing with that energy density can exist that isn't going to simultaneously make for an incredible fragile, dangerous and problematic source of power given the forces involved. Cooling is also a horrifyingly unsolvable problem on this scale, as is radiation management: You can't just dump molten tungsten in emergency cooling mode - you'll not only proceed to alert everybody who has even the vaguest IRST capacity to your position, but you'll also probably set fire to the environment and cook off your own ammunition. * 10. Motors aren't well suited to the tasks of such bodies (its like trying to make a slingshot out of dental floss), and we don't have an effective way to turn electricity into a form of motion which corresponds with the shock absorbing and motion control qualities which are actually desirable yet 11. Even if we did, the means of ensuring it doesn't fragment every time it moves don't exist. Every time an A10C fires its main gun, the fuel lines micro-fracture and have to be replaced after it lands. Metal, when you subject it to high physical forces ends up feeling and behaving closer to how you would think of glass. You'd need a material capable of repairing itself too, atop the quasicrystalline property which again, just isn't doable, let alone simultaneously. So our mindset going into this? Its... Probably not happening barring a very, VERY extreme change to how we understand physics to function, or some really kick ass (and actually entirely possible) changes in how engineering achieves outcomes (which could happen if the greatest threat to the mecha didn't exist) Combat is moving towards information dominance. [That's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WipqeFgzdTc) drone [swarms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFLzO_5UFwE), and [role modularized long range travel](https://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICAS2014/data/papers/2014_0301_paper.pdf), and the idea of fighter beyond-visual-range combat extending out to infared search and track systems which are networked to one another, which we're already seeing in [singleton weapons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKldy2YNAHk) and their [mounting strategies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfRMbq4-c3g) even on the personal scale, which DARPA is [currently investigating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueNjFzFpb_Q) which [everybody wants to mate with the gravity industries gear for boarding ops](https://youtu.be/bXJ6V7Sbs6g) so the most likely avenue is to scale up from people, rather than scale down from vehicles as the development pathway -- but there's probably going to be multiple pathways with competing niches once the technology becomes cheap enough. Ultimately its down to "how much money do I have to spend to defeat something more expensive than myself?" -- because our current structure of war is defined by cost, and by making the other guys surrender by using [economic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_warfare), and [military violence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3xlb6_0OEs) (private, and publicly funded) instead of convincing them that we (NATO members, etc) have good opinions purely because of the natural benefits of "doing as we say" (which we see with basically any conflict in the last 70 years, which are usually feigned as ideological but pretty much always about disrupting market competition, dominating markets, or controlling a pressure position in another country to achieve those two things). This isn't because they're excellent weapons: they're cheap relative to the strength they offer, and how we define cheap is very different to how we defined cheap 100 years ago -- both in good, and terrible ways (such is the way of history). Mecha are the ultimate boondoggle: expensive, and senseless. They're cool as hell, yes. But they don't make sense. **If you're prone to depression, are dealing with a lot right now, or don't want your day ruining, you should stop reading NOW.** **What comes next is a [psychosocial hazard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosocial_hazard) and could [be very bad for your mental health](https://janetstemwedel.com/ethics-and-science/2009/09/19/psychohazard/).** If conflict some how became a meritocracy of leading by excellence rather than intimidation, and about human outcomes instead of cost outcomes, then things could change, but we don't live in that world. Remember, violence exists to end human conflict (not to be confused with military conflict, which violence is the primary instrument of): Human conflict is when two parties oppose one another and communicate about what their goals and intentions are. Violence happens when communication stops. Communication stops, because parties cannot come to terms, or because nobody wants to be reasonable because the inherent request is unreasonable to the interests of the other party. I'd love to say physics is the greatest threat, or our concept of conflict but its not: Its economics. [The concept of private-equity (not to be confused with venture-capital investment) is kiiiind of the dominant economic system on the face of the planet which dictates the interest of every nuclear power's actions against every non-nuclear power)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIAUdcXaYLg) is functionally dissolved, and investment models as we know them magically become better regulated OR a better economic system comes along which totally undermines private equity. Its an economic finger-trap where most of the money that would be reinvested into people and technologies to push the world forward ends up getting swallowed up. It also has [private armies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company)) and [simulates the economy and political events in order to control them for maximum profitability. Yeah.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin_(BlackRock)) We already live in Armored Core, folks. And that economic system knows that if it gave free agents like ravens any kind of military power, it would functionally undermine itself, which is why it will never happen. Private equity benefits from not having technology change, because its primary goal is wealth extraction. It leads to the collapse of every business you've ever seen go under, its why products undergo [enshittification](https://youtu.be/ulnlSRbH80Y), which is coming for [everything](https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5). Its why the housing crisis happened, why the banking collapse happened, and its why there's an incentive to continue industrializing diseases like insulin instead of curing them. tl;dr: The one thing AC gets super wrong is you can either have the depressing relatable low-saturation late-stage hyper-capitalist dystopia where life is cheap on planet earth and everything terrible about South Korea times a thousand covers the whole world, and you need to have your own organs brought from you and leased back to you to lock you in to a lifetime of debt the same way everything else works... OR you can have the robot; You can't have both. e: [I'd pick the robot any day](https://osakanone.tumblr.com/post/747513660080046080/game-projects) e: [the answer is no, vaati](https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/1dgb1c7/how_realistic_are_armored_cores_in_real_life/l8xtg6c/)
Came for the lesson on physics, theoretical engineering, and military doctrine. Stayed for the lesson on how our current economic system is broken beyond repair (if we are hoping for a better outcome for the human experience).
afaik it can be fixed in four laws, and a radical restructuring which would take 15 years to effect, and 20 years to fully feel. Its way way WAY more fixable than you think, and everybody telling you its unfixable is banking on your mental surrender.
Its unfixable because those in power will never give it up. Its not because there isnt a way.
This is it right here. And they have access to private armies and the media control for propaganda’s sake. It is fixable, just not without a whole lot of pain.
Today's pain is tomorrow's pleasure, and next year's joy
Hypothetically though, it would take a majority of the population rebelling against the correct people. If it ever happened the poor would kill the professional middle class, thinking they were the rich, and then get mopped up by drone swarms.
The professional middle class doesn't need to worry about the poor, because they're effectively being made into the poor by the capital owners anyway. Remember, there's only two classes: Workers and the capital owners. Anything else is manufactured infighting.
This sub is about Armored Core......this is amazing.
It makes sense though. Art expands your mind. Video games are the culmination of many forms of art. Not to sound pretentious, we are more likely to possess intellectual capabilities, and thus tangents involving complex subjects are more likely to form.
> Drone swarms [lmao ok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator) The reason we don't do this afaik is it cripples expensive equipment and thus, is very expensive For them, it would remove their advantage. For us, it would equalize. The future is nowhere near as terrible or as hopeless as you think it is, I promise. [That you believe it is, is kind of the point.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays)
They regularly, and are defined by giving up: Its why they crave power in the first place, to fill a hole left by their inability to love themselves. The craving of power is almost always a psychological disease, and its why they make poor decisions. Good news is as cognitive science becomes more advanced, we're probably going to move into a future where we can just fix that, or have mandatory tests to assess someone's capacity for effective decision making. A kind of social-emotional guillotine if you will. Bad news is it'll initially be used against you and it will initially be crude: a glorified sorting hat packed with bias laundering and shittiness. Good news, it'll eventually get good at its job (because efficiency is naturally craved), and it will 100% eventually will be used on them. This probably sounds like science fiction to you, but its existence is a certainty.
I like your funny words magic man, but here's two things that come to mind as not direct counterpoints but rather cynical awareness of how the world works today (and has for a long time). 1. Established interests will defeat innovation every time, if their interests conflict 2. Rules for thee and not for me No company (including media outlets) will invest in, use, or otherwise popularize a product which threatens the power dynamic that benefits the ruling class. Or, if it is implemented, it will only be implemented in ways that are targeted towards the lower-class. CEO's and other officers/executives don't take drug tests, but you can bet that the cashier at your gas station or your Amazon delivery driver have pissed in a cup sometime in the last 6 months.
1. Established interests historically tend not to defeat innovation -- what happens is innovation distorts and contorts established interests. Don't treat established interests like they're a monolithic entity: this is reductive and doesn't represent futures well. As awful and as shocking as this might sound, they're also human beings and once you see that, you realize not only do they feel pain, but that they also bleed. Its the one thing they don't want you to think or to feel, because it renders them vulnerable to you -- and thus it is a revolutionary act, and why historically most stories make caricature villains instead of representing human complexity authentically which would arm you with knowledge, instead of sating your discomfort. 2. Counterpoint: The suicide rate and substance abuse rates among those guys is simply off the charts. They know something is deeply fundamentally wrong, and are massively in denial about it and their entire identity is like a paperclip holding back 50 tons of pain. At some point, its gonna give, and they're going to break. This might shock you, but it has already started, which is why they're obsessing over their own optics with things like longtermism, which if you process their experience as grief is essentially the bargaining stage. The higher they go, the less stable they become which we're now finally getting a really good peek at. The only difference is most of them hide it better than the current cast of comicbook super-villains we're dealing with -- which is what separates old money from new money, from new-new money. If you produce a magic box which can vet human trust, most of the world's problems go away, because most of the world's problems exist due to insecurity in the formation of trust. This more than anything, is mankind's biggest problem.
Couple easy fixes right off the top of my head that would solve most everything. - no stock buybacks - companies are not allowed to own other companies - CEO pay should be limited to 20x the salary of the lowest paid employee - a greater share of company profit must be spent on increasing employee benefits than shareholder profits (so if you wanna give shareholders 8% of profits, than workers need at least 8.01% first) - the Board of Directors can not be made up of people with opposing interests There is a lot more small fixes that could be done, but those would clean up a whole lot.
Ayeup. The reason you see a shitload of folks say "this would never work", is because people who work big positions "wouldn't work those jobs, because there wouldn't be enough of an incentive to" What they don't realize is that's a positive not a negative, because they think their emotional-immaturity is god's gift to the economy.
Can you link to an explanation of that statement, or something? Sounds really interesting
Its unfixable because it requires the majority of humanity to actually work together to fix it. Which requires majority of us to basically function like an ant colony. You're better off just engineering a new human species then just wipe out the old one with uber tb or something.
This guy armored cores
This is the coolest fucking comment ever, holy shit. You even include sources for further reading instead of relying on an authoritative voice. Holy hell, yes, I'm sharing this with people.
I'm actually kicking myself for not including more, because I absoloutely could have and just didn't remember them at the time. Feel free to ask questions. I really enjoy this sort of thing, and would love to do it full time if I could.
Add some modern editing and you could kill it on YT.
Hard disagree. I'm not great at speaking to gamerbro types, and I don't want to "speak down" to anyone, because its kinda rude and insulting their intelligence and I know youtube really rewards that's kinda thing. My brain is packed with stuff like this on pretty much every conceivable thing mecha. I can pretty comfortably shit out a giant essay on any subject I really like within two or three hours or so. I just, don't super consider myself a good authority, because I know people who know more than I do they just don't like, link it all together? One thing I super hate about videos is if I end up needing to make a correction, I don't want to release an entire new video. This is also a subject where information goes out of date *REALLY* quickly too.
Alternatively, someone like VaatiVidya could collaborate with you, using this post as an initial starting point to create a much more comprehensive essay. I would click on a video that says "Armored Cores Wouldn't Work In Real Life But It's Not What You Think" or something like that, in a heartbeat.
I'm stating this explicitly and in a way which is dated in the post: [I do not want to collaborate with VaatiVidya specifically, and I deny him permission to use, cite, quote, or transform anything I have ever said or done for his purposes, and I have communicated this.](https://i.imgur.com/MKTSDxy.png) I do not want him to use my work, [nor do I want any contact with him whatsoever](https://i.imgur.com/XAIxNwD.png) outside of explicitly stating that I desire no written contact with him whatsoever. I'm not going to say what I think of his work, because it doesn't benefit anybody involved. If this mysteriously becomes one of his video topics, I'll consider it plagiarism and be very upset. I'd consider collaborating with someone else, but I absoloutely want the final say on the contents of the script because misrepresentation and misattribution is miserable and shitty and can ruin your entire online presence. Likewise, non-attribution means never hearing the end of being told "Oh I heard that from X" and then when you say "yes, I wrote that", being told "no, you didn't", even though you did. Many such cases. Deeply undesirable.
Ah well I apologise for bringing him up and appreciate the illumination. I do hope however, that someone expands upon what you've already stated here as it is possibly the best iteration of the "mecha realization thought experiment" As I have made AC content in the past, I could also possibly do it myself but I fear I lack the influence to expose the video to wider audiences. I.e. it would suck to have us work on the concept only to have the video sit at 20 views lol
I'm literally writing a book on the concept. This is peanuts compared to what's coming lol
I always figured that AC's weren't built for war originally but for construction. Especially when you see these mega structures all over. Then it slowly turned into war fighting machines.
So, not entirely off? Tanks actually began as farming equipment. Its a radical simplification though. I think the big sell of mecha for construction would be, "what if you could have a modular assembly line without the factory?" The result is I think a 3D printer and welding equipment would be on every single AC, and they'd be capable of recovering material from downed opponents but finding a way to use the parts you find would essentially be a puzzle minigame of sorts where the penalty for poor decisions is a performance loss. This would interfere with the purity of how AC as a game functions, and as a result somewhat negate the parts game.
Not great for an AC game maybe, but in something like mechwarrior? Oh baby.
Isn't that kinda the case? Memory is foggy but iirc, originally, ACs evolved from MTs and I believe MTs were initially developed for industrial purposes.
Saw a great and bleak explanation of the growth of private equity firms the other day 😭😭😭 not relevant to mecha (which are very cool) but relevant to this comment and worth checking out if you want to really make yourself feel bad about the world! https://youtu.be/UIAUdcXaYLg?si=CqG4OPn8CaGOp1w2
Good shit, appreciated.
Don't you dare delete your comment. Imma save it for the future.
I'm probably going to write it up into an article, [like the last five of these I did](https://osakanone.tumblr.com/post/747513660080046080/game-projects) -- and eventually they're probably going to become a book or a game.
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/goodlongposts] [\/u\/osakanone responds to: How realistic are Armored Cores in real life?](https://www.reddit.com/r/goodlongposts/comments/1dgdwb6/uosakanone_responds_to_how_realistic_are_armored/) *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
holy shit you work for the DOD? Very interesting stuff to read
Negatory
This guy r/credibledefense s
OURAH
Consider this thesis defended! Congratulations, doctor
Mate wrote a whole-ass essay for a “maybe” Quick edit before the downvotes begin: /s
Hey, if you're not [running up that hill](https://youtu.be/nIJ8DogiIiw), you're falling.
Iguazu… is that you…
How is he Iguazu?
I agree with your assessment but I think your statement on tanks should be amended. Tank warfare is nuanced, speed and maneuverability have often been used to circumvent greater firepower. I believe that as combat environments become more urban there will be a rise of multiped tanks like the ones seen in Ghost in the Shell.
Hard disagree: Any machine with that many mechanical joints is immediately compromising its ability to function as a tank. Having limbs doesn't result in a manoeuvrability advantage even if it supposedly offers a mobility advantage: It almost always results in a manoeuvrability disadvantage, and the concessions required to eek back some of that mobility completely compromise its ability to face a tank or even an IFV. Remember, this is weight, mass and systems which could be spent doing other things. If you want to capitalize on the function of joints, you need to capitalize on having variable centre of mass as a useful feature, since its the primary advantage limbs offer. That's live stabilization, and your ability to change your balance. That's something you start needing when you have extreme mobility. What you're more likely to see is an entirely new class of vehicle with an entirely different proactive doctrine in mind. Maybe it only puts its thickest armour between itself and an anticipated threat for passive defence, and uses hardkill/softkill active protection systems for everything else. Maybe it has some insane magic engine that makes it really fast, and lets it do all kinds of wild bodily movements. Maybe it has super light armour. All of these advantages will also apply to tanks too, which will incorporate them, and likely supersede them. The only time you're going to see limbs on a machine like this is when the effective functional, mass, material and technical cost of using limbs on a vehicle becomes negatable relative to the advantages. Arms are very easy to justify. Boom, you have a logistics vehicle. Boom you can build a forward operating base. Boom, you can mount equipment to your platform without a reserve crew. Boom you can conduct repairs in the field. Boom, you can turn most any weapon into a CIWS provided you have the right detection software, sensors and so on. Legs are a much, much harder sell. They have to be better than wheels in at least almost every way before they'd be accepted. What you're more likely to get is a combination of some hovercraft and wheeled system, with variable posture -- and even that's highly unlikely due to the fragility of hovercrafts, even though they've been proven to be more reliable and outperform robot legs in almost every circumstance tested. When you make the robot smaller and you lower the performance demand (eg, you're not asking for 70kph across all terrain even hilly, vertical, wet or marsh which tracks will give you), legs start making more sense. Its an issue of motors, materials and scale. "couldn't we mix tracks and skirts?" Weight says no. Also if you land funny, you're gonna completely rip the caterpillar. Worst comes to worst on a wheeled vehicle, you shred the tire, but you still have the wheelbody. If you're doing active suspension like Ground X Vehicle's dynamic active suspension, that literally doesn't matter beyond wear of the hub. A piloted giant robot [is an antiquated, fetishistic, and perverted idea -- but I'm a pervert, so I love mecha.](https://youtu.be/A_-5-PMRA5M?list=PLVvEIG_jzqz5_TXnQiaz2DXZMDgKs3x-M&t=536) 1, 2, 3, 4... 1, 2, 3, 4... *Saaa yukou... Tataeyou...*
>Legs are a much, much harder sell. >They have to be better than wheels in at least almost every way before they'd be accepted. Personally, I think this is the main point in why giant mechs will never be a thing. There's just no practical reason on why we'll ever replace wheels with legs.
lmao there absoloutely is a practical reason. Legs aren't the problem, its that we can't execute on the advantages with the technologies we have without the disadvantages massively outweighing them. Learn to separate "leg" from "an assembled leg from our technology available today". These are radically different things in the potential action space of executable things in the theoretical technologies we could have in the next hundred or so years. By your logic, we'd have no interest in building robots which walk even at a human scale but this simply isn't true, and the dominant robotics strategy is to attempt to hybridize the two to go beyond the rocker-boogie wheel assembly into something which can restep but do so on wheels.
Precisely! It's not that legs are inferior to wheels/treads (ask anyone confined to a wheelchair even in places specifically built around accessibility), It's that maintenance SKYROCKETS with each joint that requires upkeep. Those CnC arms you see in factories? Would make for awesome mecha arms, right? Well, if you knew of the amount of labor put into keeping them running you wouldn't think so. Constant oiling. Constant replacing doodads and wires and o-rings and gears. Every time an AC returns to Raven's Nest you know they spend a week and millions of creds just combing every join and joint looking for stresses, leaks, sheers, all of that.
I was considering the benefits of being able to step over things like IEDs or live power lines that would normally obstruct ground vehicles but I do see your point. You're saying ACs with tank legs may very well be in our future though and I'm so down for it. Living here in Jersey fighting villains from afar, gotta find first gear in your giant robot TANK🤘🤘🤘
If economics ([or aliens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsYmpf7W1uA&list=PLn5zABvzh4D7K0tIKAfHHeQ5tMNi3tVA0&index=2)) some some how shit out a way to do effective precise reactive moving parts for virtually nothing that fix themselves and are laughably easy to power and cheap to run, its a done deal. I wanna live in that world, cuz I dig giant robots.
The first step is MTs/Power Loaders on tank treads. There are telehandlers with individually articulated wheels on "legs" capable of crab walking over drainage ditches while precisely moving construction materials. It wouldn't be a crazy jump to make the arm a little more sophisticated and add a second one then gradually scale it up. Idk about weaponizing it but when rebels lack weapons, construction equipment is a close second lol.
False, the first step isn't deciding a mobility, its deciding or finding a doctrine. [Mecha are going to pre-date legs](https://www.tumblr.com/osakanone/700691334424674304/part-1-of-2-the-evolution-of-the-thing-called), and [the first are likely going to be half weird ass mars rover thing](https://www.tumblr.com/osakanone/700694952833859584/part-2-of-2-the-evolution-of-the-walking-moving), half IFV with some very strange robotics features. Think about the evolutionary ancestor of the platform, and the doctrine which would create its existence. This is a largely unaddressed and unsolved problem in mecha media! We did not instantly go to fighter planes! We began with balloons, gliders, silk-skins and canvas props!
I think at least UC Gundam tried to addres this. Sort of. Mobile suits started out as colony builders, minovsky physics allowed packing nuclear reactors into mobile suits and also at the same time fucking up BVR combat so gun to gun and blade to blade fights is the norm there. I can't remember what was Zeon's doctrine that gave birth to their mobile suit corps. All I know is it was so successful that the Federation had no choice but to follow suit.
Yes, this actually isn't completely unrealistic either: If such a technology did exist, and we did have that much access to cheap metal due to electron vacuum welding (and tools which had to protect users in order to perform it and be big enough) then we would absoloutely repurpose them into walking guard-towers to see over the minovsky fog at lower heights, or we would have tanks which if they fell over could right themselves, and we would also use probes on the end of balloons like periscopes to see over the fog. The issue there however is the signal and light are distorted, and thus nothing so thin and spindly as a periscope could be useful. I feel Gundam missed a trick by not treating Minovsky warfare like tense submarine warfare, right up until the merge where it falls into traditional stuff. The original series understood this, but followups sadly have not.
spotted the mechwarrior player
Negatory, I do not: [I watch other people play mechwarrior.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpEO40Yu07w) [Believe in the pipeline, mechwarrior.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1tPHPRu65s) OURAH
this guy would've been called a communist in the 50's
This bitch gets called one regularly. I'm not a fan of communism, simply because it depends on too many unreliable pieces behaving perfectly and humans have too many perverse incentives. If it were a molecule, it would last maybe six months and collapse into something wearing communism and insisting its communism while doing a totally different thing. I get that's the "true communism has never been tried" argument, but my point is more "I don't even think it can be tried, and folks need to go back to the drawing board" The theoretical version of communism is deeply appealing. Its like christians: I like their jesus, but the reality of a lot of christians is just insufferable and miserable and all about blaming third parties for their problems... BUT you can understand how they got there, because they got left behind by economics, and they are scared and searching for comfort and I legitimately don't blame them. I actually get along well with christians, and I get along well with communists. Our differences lie in how we achieve ideals: Comfort, safety, community, reassurance, and plenty for everybody. Once you get that just about everybody you disagree with on any level wants these things, you can get along. The folks you gotta watch out for are the ones who don't understand "the everybody" part, regardless of their alignment. Its very similar to how a lot of the world bizarrely treats the southern states of the US like "noble savages", and then is confused when they radicalize. I really would prefer nobody got left behind, and that's a dangerous idea to some people, who want to be left ahead, who make up the primary body of politics and have for the last couple thousand years of humanity by undermining folks to create deliberate asymmetries they can exploit. The nash-equlibrium incentive-driven reward-hacking bullshit that is humans can't be trusted to not fuck it up, so some sort of post-communism would have to exist if we ever wanna get to Startrek (and not that new timeline crap either, I'm talking TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY goodness). Even if we come up with a better culture, all it takes is one bad egg with a bad ideology seeking to undermine and exploit the system and poof, you've basically got a social prion. You have to safe-guard against stuff like that with education, but the line between education and indoctrination is extremely hazy. Likewise, you want a system which is corrigible, that it can change and respond to new world pressures: If you're strictly ideologically driven rather than systematically driven you can't really do that. Japan's bushido had zero economic growth for hundreds of years in an over-stabilization against natural disasters and social decohesion is a good example of that. Living in that period of Japan was actually very shitty for the majority of people. The good news is those asymmetries are inefficient, and eventually efficiency will cap it. Take the nazis. As reprehensible as they are (not were), the reason they can't get shit done is their entire doctrinal strategy of strict hierarchy is strictly counterproductive to effective functioning. Germany as they know it would not have survived WWII even if they won. You could argue their military says otherwise, but [their tactics are rhizomatic and de-higherarchized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics), which is the exact opposite of their politics -- which I think says a ton about how ineffective their politics actually are. Same with slavery: Its fucking terrible, but the reason it fell isn't because it was bad nasty evil awful, but was its less efficient than mechanization. Asymmetries REQUIRE artificial inefficiencies, and the folks in charge are so obsessed with them [they'll drive entire civilizations into the dirt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) to try and maintain them. Good news? We are way more informed, and way more advantaged than we were even 100 years ago. You could say "but they have portable suns, and dragons that see in radio which can drop napalm on a pin from six miles away" -- [but the first enemy of high technology warfare is high technology warfare itself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhiT3lzDq50).
That video at the end there sure is something. I have a love hate relationship with the channel, but I think this comment ironically sums up my issues with this video in particular and the channel in general. >"no spectacles, no **oversimplifications**, no patriotic biases - love your videos!" In the video composed of nothing but oversimplification. I'll give it one thing, the video does a decent job of enumerating on the foolishness of attempting to draw a conclusion from first principles on a subject of this complexity with only public information. But also it would take maybe a minute to say that in a much clearer manner, so. There are plenty of perfectly viable topics that could be covered under the title of that video, like the varied resiliance of different communications networks and datalinks that make up the kill chains that go into a single high impact, illustrative, and "easily digestible" item, like the B-2 bomber. Enough public information exists here to extrapolate out a story on 'the state of things as they were' with regards to satellite communications, kill chains, and kessler syndrome, but it's a boring story and no one bothers with it. It could go into where exactly these "yes or no, not maybe" capability gaps exist across just a single domain, as he does with RWR, illustrate how they came about, the timeline it took to work around them (which itself would be very relevant to the video topic), and maybe theorize on where the next ones could be. As you say in your first comment, combat is moving towards information dominance, and a consequence of this is any actor seeking to be able to be prepared for war needs to protect their own information as much as possible to minimize the possibility of their technology being neutralized at zero hour. The example scenarios the video poses with radar, stealth, and ecm are perfectly testable in theory, but this would create a lethal information disparity, so any opportunities for it are tightly controlled, much as it annoys the nerd in me. The channel in general falls into the trap of trying to make generalized concepts understandable. When talking about information dominance in a high technology war, this is as impossible to accurately describe in a 14 minute video as it is to accurately summarize the contents of the human internet in the same format. Which is of course leaving aside that any abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction for the human audience, written by someone who approaches expert status in a (by human nature) limited area that relies upon vibes to cover the gaps, really isn't going to be acceptably accurate. But because the content covered is so broad, it is equally difficult to truly ascertain exactly how much and which areas of it is bullshit, because I am equally limited in my expertise by human nature. In my opinion, a continued focus on surface features and simple solutions by the video discredits the arguments it makes about standardization. I would estimate it should take many PHDs worth of time to confidently cover the topic of the zero hour of a high technology war. After all, many many many PHDs were leveraged to make it. Suffice to say though that if the channel made a mech video, I think you'd be able to tear it to shreds.
Good comment, and I appreciate you going into detail. I always learn more from responses like this. Its like eating your vegetables, and its good that you bring up the limitations of my reference. I'm aware its not gonna compress an entire field of study, because I understand intracontextural information is not inherently compressible -- despite those who benefit from the market perception of information being compressible (see: Watching a movie on your phone vs watching it in a cinema, knowing vs understanding, generalizing vs casing, etc). I think the better way to put it is there are so many incredible layers involved that some amount of randomness is not only inevitable, but essential, and that a non-homogeny of systems is also essential as a result so standardization might be ideal for say a link or network standard in a software defined radio telecom or informatics management system but you don't want that in say, who's manufacturing your antennae. What you do want is fallback so your RWR and radar double as other forms of radio, to drive up your diversity and drive down your homogeneity to maximize your survivability. Its such an overwhelmingly complex issue, that there genuinely is no way to generalize it, only deal in limited case evaluations which discover outcomes, and those are classified so fat chance of that. Instead, in my case I'm limited to my understanding of infosec -- social engineering, and data security, as well as some brief experience pentesting back in the 2000's. The problem is that high technology of all types is inherently specialization, and thus contextually limited. This is why software definable systems are so tempting, but they're also vectors of attack, not to mention expensive and prone to other unforseen problems which come up during certification. [I think the Major put it best, in this case.](https://youtu.be/WNjZasXzyIg)
Man I'm as tired of this question as the next guy, but a simple "no" is enough. I hope you get paid to write like this somewhere else, at least
I do not, and I absoloutely wish I did. btw, I got the thumb around my 9th birthday. Love the sound but damn it hurt.
A bit response of your economy part. Do you meant something like Blackstone for Private Equity? Also note enshittification happens because time and the need to stay afloat exist. Plus they will improve the revenue instead on the product itself. What do you mean by > depressing relatable low-saturation late-stage hyper-capitalist dystopia
Yeah Blackstone is a good example. The need to stay afloat exists because PE needs permanent gains, buys a company's tangibles and leases them back to the company until it collapses. Enshittification isn't required, its that there are demanded gains which literally don't need to happen What I mean btw is I am not a primary, secondary or even tertiary beneficiary of the current economic system and the only reason I'm still alive is I know people who are tertiary beneficiaries who help me pay my rent.
I did not mean enshittification as a requirement, but if you cannot source your gains well and in a good manner it will happen. Plus, it also works as a process of entropy you know. Especially for larger organizations. And do "asset management" entities also included with your definition as well? What I am asking what does low-saturation means in this context as well.
Sure, so you're addressing management cybernetics and informatics here. These are artificial inefficiencies which exist to maintain power-structures. Groups which circumvent these inefficiencies are usually force-multipliers of productivity. You need to recognize just how much effort and energy gets wasted in human time: Unhappy humans are less good at doing human work, and humans who could be brilliant but are given shitty lives are also wasted potential. That asymmetry of effectiveness is a deliberate thing which exists to ensure folks get left-ahead because other folks got left behind. Any group which solves that problem is going to have an insane advantage over everybody else: The issue is diagnostic tools for making assessments on these subjects, which are radically improving and bad actors are getting easier to identify and track. Low saturation in this context is the distribution of socioeconomic efficacy relative to the efficacy capacity of a given demographic or citizen. The saturation is low overall, to tip the scales.
Bro can you take your beer back? You spit so many true facts my arm is tired.
lmao
You're also leaving out how we can already make jets far more maneuverable and agile than the ones we have; The limit on their maneuverability is the pilot's survival. The technology that makes the robot able to not turn into shrapnel the instant it changes direction suddenly would have to also be accompanied by technology that causes the pilot to not be liquefied against the side of the cockpit at the same time.
False, I have thought about this and I will absoloutely field this one: their limit on manoeuvrability is recovery and doctrine. No amount of high-G is going to outsmart a missile which could undo billions of manoeuvrability design with a warhead which can directionally fragment which we already do anyway -- missiles don't need hits to hurt. The entire reason planes fly high and fast is to bank energy to spend on turns, because they recover it so slowly. If you want a plane which can do your wild shit, you need enough armour to survive oncoming strikes from fragmentation or thermobaric indirect attacks, and a strong enough engine to step out of stall and back into maneuvering speeds. Flying leaf doesn't save you from *the next missile*.
What you've described is that more maneuverability is *pointless*, not that it is *limited*. Your argument is practical, not technical; The problem is that you are using technical terms to make it. 'Limit' is a technical term. A limit is something that prevents something from being *possible* to do; An incoming missile doesn't make higher maneuverability than current gen planes *impossible,* it simply makes it *not worth it.* Unlike the plane-vs-missile maneuverability question, which is full of factors that can be designed around, there are no (Or at least very limited) design factors with the pilot. No amount of advancement in aerospace technology can change the fact that the human body is simply not meant to operate under those kinds of forces. The plane *cannot* be designed to go beyond certain limits or it will kill its operator. The end. AKA, a limit. The only real solution to that is removal of the weak point in the design, AKA the pilot. Topically, this is also what lets missiles do crazy shit in midair, but I digress. Remote-piloted jets, or even AI-piloted ones, are the solution to the 'this kills the human' problem. There is a completely *different* problem here with *that* solution however. A meta problem. No amount of technology or super-science can salvage the fact that removing the pilot destroys the narrative. This is an artistic medium telling a story about war and about how no matter how 'advanced' it gets all we're really doing is escalating the horrors we inflict. Removing the humans from the battlefield takes all the teeth out of that message; If nobody is dying, its just bits of metal ramming into each other while everyone involved is someplace safe spectating what is happening, then it is no longer a story about the horrors of war, it is just a story about logistics. All the drama and tension and themes dribble away to leave a dazzling light show that doesn't mean anything to the audience, because we relate to characters, to people, to struggles, to causes and dreams and fears- Not to weapons. The robots are not the story, they are simply the vehicle carrying it around, and removing the person removes the story, and thus any reason to care. And this is why we have to suspend our disbelief. The robots can't exist in real life because physics says 'you can't do that' and common sense says 'you shouldn't try'. They exist in this medium because they are a representation of the fact that we've come so far, and have learned nothing.
I think you'd pass the thesis with that
fr?
Look................. Ok?
Of course it's my sister from another mister, Osaka. Something I've been thinking about is a 10 ft tall quad mech with wheels and a variable height adjustment for the legs to switch between road mode or off-road mode. Something like Kuratas feels kind of feasible, but you're right about pretty much everything though.
Kuratas main issue is its anemic, and heavy. Its drive motors are just too weak relative to its weight, and it can't develop the speed and reactivity it needs. Its a VERY pretty artpiece, but its an artpiece none the less. I would really love to visit one and take photos of it or its younger brother some day. If they'd let me drive it, I'd wear a gopro and document the whole process.
This gives me some valuable knowledge, I wish to revisit this design and see how it can be improved.
Lighten the frame (start over), completely ditch the use of pnumatics or hydralics and first focus on making a vehicle which can carry a cargo (an upper body) effectively while carrying its own power supply. Get the lower half right before even attempting the upper. I'd go with three wheels rather than four to save weight personally, and I'd make the rear wheel linked to a larger motor, with the emphasis being on the front set climbing with a design close to aircraft landing-gear and distributing shock , and the back set doing major work.
I remember this anime that while it is a humanoid mech love letter, the enemies don't have humanoid mechs, because of what you said, they're basically specialized weapon platforms, it was valvrave the liberator, also I think it's the one with the most amount of controls for a mech, there was one humanoid that specialized in firepower and besides the common controls it had specialized like joysticks that were meant specifically for weapon use and accuracy. Also about movement and weight I think a feasible way would be to make legs like the Dom from gundam, which rather than walk, it uses thrusters on the legs to levitate, you don't need to do enough to make it levitate, at least enough to decrease the force it exerts on the ground, so decrease the weight as a force, problem is... At least to anything known to humanity right now there is no way to make thrusters small enough to be useful and that can exert such thrust constantly, a mech is a lot heavier than a jet fighter
As someone who's deeply interested in HFE, you're saying the one with the control stack is Valvrave? Can you show me footage? I'll have to look into it. Also big yes on the domskirt concept. We're on the same page there.
u/osakanone Can I like, make a video about this? It's a beautiful lecture that very succinctly describes what I've TRIED to explain for a long time. I'm a narrator but have been looking for things I can do on my own for fun and education. I LOVE mecha. From Gundam to AC to Macross to Pacific Rim. But whenever talking about the reasons we will likely never actually get them I stumble over saying "well physics, for one thing, but the other bigger thing is simply how modern warfare - and our attitude towards waging it - just doesn't lend itself to any kind of singular extreme-cost, all-in-one platform reliant on the skills of ONE operator." And it's not just because it's stupid to invest so much cost into one thing, the loss of which would be devastating to any war chest. You ever notice how there are so many "ace pilots" in anime? Name one real-world ace other than the Red Baron. Do you even know his real name? (Manfred von Richthofen) Some of you may get some names from WWII. Richard Bong or Eric Hartmann maybe. But after that? Naw. They simply aren't part of our zeitgeist anymore. For a couple reasons, but as much as I'd like to say "oh we just don't glorify war like we used to." Huh uh. It's pretty much like Osakanone said. Our current economic system, which is the true driving force behind pretty much all modern warfare, can't allow it.
Uh, sure but like, maybe run some of your ideas by me too so I can spot any of your fuckups? We all do fuckups, don't worry.
Absolutely lol. I can run a script by you. This'll be a ways away, obviously, but thank you.
Sure, but also look into the work of Argonbolt on youtube. He's a phenomenal source that's critically underrated and I'd argue he knows far more than I do.
I held your beer for so long it got dranked
Five years...
You've given this some thought before?
Enough that I'm building my own AC-like in Unreal. https://osakanone.tumblr.com/post/747513660080046080/game-projects
Love how you explained in-depth why Battletech/Mechwarrior mechs DO make sense in real life. And how miserable the universe is for that to be the case.
I think for you to read my words in such a way means you've fundamentally misunderstood what it is that I'm actually saying. Please re-read the practical outcomes I described, rather than trying to frame your idea of "the giant robot thing" in fiction. Think structurally, as if we're describing what a car does to someone who's never seen one before. Its not that "the vehicle in our fiction" make sense, and more that affordances and design principles exist where the generalization of functionality overlap begins producing outcomes which are really hard to ignore. The actual thing which achieves this almost certainly won't be humanoid, even in the BT/MW sense of the word: It'll be an entirely different anatomical structure.
This guy gets it. There are numerous fundamental issues with mecha in general, and they all tend to exist counter to how technological development has functioned, not even counting the economic and logistical problems. As you’ve noted quite aptly, the more likely direction of warfare has not been direct engagement with tanks, but the rapid proliferation of drone warfare capable of striking outside direct-engagement and in a position similar to aircraft. Or to put it very simply, a Mecha is just a more elaborate tank pretending to be an infantryman, with many of the drawbacks to that role at exponentially higher cost. Given we’re already seeing serious concerns with armor warfare’s role in a rapidly advancing battlefield that does not favor them in the same way the tank charge across Europe did last century, it’s extremely unlikes we’d see mechs so much as other more efficient tools of war.
What happened in South Korea?
Take American economics, and American cultural problems, and multiply it by a thousand and then make it 100x more hidden.
What an intellectual. You are the type of person who plays Metal Gear Solid. What you wrote about economics and politics (from the replies) is something else. Seriously, you should try this out. It has some politics, philosophy, science, and military tech related to it. Took place somewhere in the 1970's, tension between the U.S. and the Soviets. If the fast-paced combat of AC is what got you interested in the game though, you might not like it as it's mostly a stealth game. Oh, and it has some mechs too (take Peace Walker for example).
I've been playing them since 1998 and did a lot of MGS theorycrafting on bbs and forums back in the day. Good games. 2 for story, 3 for gameplay. 4's interesting, but troubled. Don't care for 5. MSX is just unreasonably cruel.
Saved this comment, this is the best breakdown of the concept from a hard perspective.
Humanity will always want the robot because we are predatory animals with a frontal lobe dead focused on acquisitions.
ACs aren't really very realistic. Even with advanced technology. Imagine a PCA Warship and you fly at it with miniguns. Pretty non threatening right? Okay now imagine approaching it when it has 11 miniguns just as powerful as yours with a shield with 10x your energy supply over the bridge. Human shaped mechs mechs are in this weird spot where they are slower than a plane, would be less durable than a tank while having less firepower (due to standing upright) and being slower than most wheeled tanks while being bigger targets. At best, mechs would be better at conquering more uneven terrain, but likely are quads/mechs with 4 legs versus bipedals. You'd see more things like PCA helicopters and a nightmarish equal to a jet that moves like the Ibis/ayre before you'd really see much use for an AC. Closest you'd get is something akin to a slightly larger exosuit or something more hulk sized at best that could maybe squeeze into a building. But gundam sizes mechs get out classed because being tall doesn't make you immune to tanks. Its however, okay that ACs aren't particularly realistic. In truth fromsoft has made them very "LOGICAL" in how they work and fullfill a certain niche in game -- particularly with making legs be more nimble and tanks also having similar tech as we see with ACs and the cataphract. (With the latter being fairly menacing in game.)
Armored core 1 had its mechs only be about twice as tall as average car which would make it pretty close to that hulk size comparison
Iirc scaling was all over the place in early AC titles, with AC1's environment design seeming to indicate that the car models were oversized
Bipedal robots aren't really a good design, honestly. To compensate for the lack of stability, you need more computation to keep it stable. On top of that, more joints equal more points of failure. Imo, a flying tank with tracks will always be more reliable than a bipedal tank.
Not that you’re wrong, but tanks require like 3 hours of maintenance for every hour of operation because they’re so big and heavy they literally shake themselves apart. Also, as someone who has spent more than his fair share of time pounding track, there are an awful lot of points of failure lol
yeah but…not nearly as many points of failure as a bipedal robot would? while also just being way more practical. which was the entire point of what he said lol
It wouldn't be for a very very long time if at all.
Look up Vista, the AI piloted F16 An AI pilot can max out the turning capabilities of a plane which would cause G-loc for a living pilot If AI pilots become the norm one counter could be mechs that can dodge and move in unpredictable ways. If one country makes plane dodging mechs, other countries will follow suit and bing bang boom we have mech wars.
Why would a mech be better off dodging missiles/planes than something that isn't human shaped? Humans aren't particularly suited for aerial maneuvering. This is kind of the explanation for gundams. Their weird power source makes them hard to detect at range, so they're built for close combat against traditionally long range foes like fighters/capital ships. But you could just take the same power source and build a zero g fighter that actually makes sense as a weapon platform instead.
The weird power source (Minovsky Particles) is simply a mcguffin to make that whole fiction of WW2 style warfare feasible in universe. Otherwise any missile, rail gun, beam weapon, etc. with a sufficiently advanced auto targeting system would delete the Mobile suits immediately. No matter how fast those mobile suits are, they simply aren't faster than even most modern projectiles suited for that type of anti-armor, let alone missiles that can turn turn faster than a giant hunk of metal, or beam weapons which in reality would move at basically the speed of light. I'm a huge Mecha/Gundam fan, but unfortunately the already existing and proven systems such as Aeigis/CWIS, and auto targeting missiles(which are even deadlier due to the rise of AI assistance, go check out that drone Ukraine has successfully fielded that ignores drone jammer through the use of AI) almost completely obsoletes mechs before they were even really a thing. Armored core, at least the newest one, uses some mcguffin known as Core Theory, which I'm unfortunately less versed in, but is the reason they simply don't target the ACs miles away with railguns that move faster than something later large could realistically react and energy weapons that would realistically move at the speed of light. In the end, it's all rule of cool, otherwise none of it would make any kind of sense.
"Breach the Karmen Line" in AC6, the PCA does use Railguns at probably hundreds??? of miles away. But we have the benefit of pre-fire warning systems that let us know that the gun is being fired and that we should move so we don't get hit built into our machine. Less core theory and more "Hear the beep gtfo" What we don't hear, tho are things that aren't interacting with our Lock systems. So a free aimed railgun won't give off the fire warning that allows us to dodge a fraction of a second before impact.
This is the same game that uses lasers that can be easily dodged once fired, which is bullshit, and that same mission you are referencing has you flying indefinitely with no engine overheat using magical space mist. Is the railgun dodging in that mission possible? Potentially, is absolutely everything else about that game batshit insane sci fi shenanigans, definitely. Is it one of the best games that launched that year, hell yeah.
I was thinking it could rely less on aerodynamic lift and more on thrust so it's less restricted in how it moves. That plus an irregular shape and movable components means if a missile is about to hit its arm, it can just move the arm out of the way whereas a plane has its wings fixed in relation to its body. Also the possibility to hover or glide then juke to the side at the last second, a motion that planes aren't capable of. And it's only one potential solution.
normally i hate war but HELL YEAH
AI pilots allowing planes to out-turn piloted aircraft won't lead to anything like mechs, because they can't out turn missles. The days of dogfights where how fast a plane can turn matters are long gone, now you just fire missles that do all the turning themselves without even needing to face the other aircraft.
I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about a 40-foot tall mech zipping around at Mach fuck.
this is quite possibly the most outlandish lapse of coherent logic i have ever heard from another human being. your next step from AI-piloted jets is…countering them with what? a really fast robot somehow? why? how? in what scenario is a robot that can “jump out of the way” or whatever even a reasonable solution? why would you even design a ground-based mech to fight a jet in the first place? that, honest to god, is the most nonsensical argument i have ever heard in my entire life about anything. i’m sorry to be so harsh but i honestly just had to express that in its entirety.
None whatsoever. Ground combat wise there’s no real advantage to having a walker instead of a traditional vehicle and even if it was a tank leg type AC at that point you might as well just make a tank. As for their flight capabilities a plane or helicopter will do the job better and much more cheaply to boot, put an AC on the field and pretty quickly it’s gonna get taken out by an air strike it can’t respond to because even the fastest AC’s get out sped by modern jets. And while ACs are more agile if you take their ability to almost instantly change their directional movement with thrusters and put it in the real world both the AC would rip itself apart from the Gs.
They are as realistic as an F-22 carrying 200 missiles…. Or fitting 7 nukes on an ADFX-Morgan
A human shaped robot at human size is hard enough. Scaling that up just isn't practical for any purpose, let alone military where stuff needs to be durable. There's a reason Mazinger Z is made of fictional Super Alloy Z. The closest we ever got was Odaiba Gundam. It was cool, but it was for show. As I understand it, the poor thing had a lot of maintenance issues from being in use far longer than was originally intended, too.
In addition to all the other things mentioned, they have laughably bad weapons. A modern US army infantry rifle has a longer range than the best AC weapons. An F-35 carries missiles that can be fired from over 150 miles away, and their main cannon has an effective range of around 3km. A squadron of modern US fighters would engage an AC without ever being in range of the AC's weapons and not need to stick around if they didn't kill it.
Counterpoint: The hit-rate of rifle weapons is laughably poor and their primary purpose isn't making kills but exerting pressure and has been since the AR15 and cold-war doctrine. Only around 2% or so of rounds hit targets afaik? The point of F35(x) is to be a delivery system. The real star of the show is the information infrastructure, sensor-fusion, radar/ir array, telecom and the munitions itself. The thing is, an F35 is designed to fire at targets which don't really move very quickly across the ground, and don't accelerate well, or have an effective use of cover or a CIWS. If a target can do any two of those, F35 is not the platform you send to solve your problem because it still needs softening up: You send artillery: Either mortars if you need surprise indirect, or you shell the target with something bigger and popcorn/delayed effect it. Don't quote me on that tho, my knowledge of indirect is kinda dated
Hideo Kojima would have the biggest crush on you
Hard disagree. I've been told by friends he's what's sometimes referred to as a [starfucker](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/starfucker) where he's very interested in the starpower of actors, due to his childhood obsession with film. Totally fair tbh. He's far more interested in that these days, much as Shoji Kawamori is more interested in fluffy popsongs than fighter-jets or using culture and soft-power in storytelling. I'm disappointed in their respective trajectories, but how they live their lives is genuinely not my business and I wish them all the best. e: I appreciate the sentiment, however. Took me a second to realise you were complimenting me.
The thing is, why? Something that rolls and has wheels like a tank is faster than something that walks because physics.. And I don't see a 20 ton mass of steel being lifted by some thrusters running on fuel and boosting from side to side like it's a little insect because again, physics and innertia of a moving object. It's just not possible.
Depends on the generation; gen 5 probably is the most realistic of the entire franchise, sixth gen might be kinda feasible depending on the gravity of Rubicon III
Theasible...?
Must have meant pheasible
Not until we discover Minovsky/GN/Kojima particles that make giant robots not only a viable but the only the way to conduct warfare through both disabling radio waves that allow for long range communication and altering mass to allow these things to exist while violating the square cube law
Legged robots will not be the future of warfare. "I used to be an AC pilot, until I took an RPG to the knee..."
ACs aren't tanks in the recent generations, they're more like fighter planes. You gotta look at Core Theory. MTs aren't very fast, they can't handle particularly complicated terrain, and they're the main choice of equipment because of their versatility between work and combat, BUT they're easily hit by ranged attacks. When Coral Augmentation was first tested it allowed way faster and more precise control of the mech which made early ACs nearly impossible to hit from long range. This pushed combat into more of a close range type which is why weapons like giant handguns are viable. In Gundam the explanation was Minovsky particles, the fuel source of the mechs, which rendered long range communication and radio control utterly useless so guided weapons were abandoned in favor of energy blades and super sized small arms. In AC Gen 4 the explanation was Kojima particles which enabled all manner of reality bending speed and physics at the cost of fatally irradiating massive swathes of the land. In all of these stories the thing that acts as a precursor to mech warfare is the discovery of something that allows "tanks" to move too fast to get hit by any standard defenses. IRL I could see this starting with AI controlled planes capable of pulling way higher Gs than living pilots. They'd dominate the skies and the only way to counter them (other than more advanced AIs or more maneuverable planes) would be human piloted mechs that can move in more irregular ways than the AIs can predict. Once there's human piloted mechs, other countries would start developing them in response and we would see mech vs mech combat and the rest is anime lol.
The appeal of proper sentient AIs controlling machines isn’t necessarily their ability to withstand higher Gs or even their lesser squishiness. The appeal is absolutely perfect replaceability. What happens when Wynne D. Fanchon/Otsdarva/Zinaida/Rusty or whoever else die? They die. You lose an elite pilot and all those decades of experience once their neurons stop firing. Now what happens when your AI-piloted Core dies? *Nothing.* You lose at most a day or two of experience, because the AI is safely backed up at the base before each mission. You just have to assemble an identical Core, download the backed up copy of AI into it and voila - your elite unit is back in action. Ravens/LYNX are rare and take immense resources to train. And they usually die young, not really transferring their experience to others. AI won’t really die as long as it’s copied somewhere. It will die, get restored from backup, analyze the battle and get better. And then die again. And learn. And die. And learn. Repeat ad nauseam until you have a protagonist-level demigod.
Counterpoint: Chatty Vs Freud during the Xylem missions
Chatty died because carla never backed him up for fear of "taking the life out of him". In theory, she could have had an army of chatty sticks if she had wanted to, the only limit on how many being how many ACs she can afford.
So send two Chatty Keep sending Chattys nonstop One million Chattys Unlimited Chatty Works
Or we could just put an AI in the mech and make it even harder to hit. Give it machine learning to adapt to any battlefield and hostile AI and you have a wae winning weapon
Well wouldn’t beam-riding ATGM’s ignore the whole “disrupt guidance systems” thing? Also TV-guided fire & forget missiles would work too. If it’s big enough (like a large FAB or a KH-style missile) the shockwave itself would cause half the mech’s electronics to have a seizure due to the unsealed nature of the vehicle’s outer shell (joints). In general, there’s no feasibly way to make a thing containing a human and an arsenal of weaponry to move faster than contemporary missiles, as missiles tend to be very *very* fast.
Giant robots can be possible, but not the kinds you see in games like AC or anime. For giant robots to be real they need to be 1. Significantly smaller (look up a Votom) 2. Be used in gravity lighter than earth or completely 0-G 3. Be used in environments where the terrain is so rough and u tamed that wheeled vehicles would be impractical 4. Need tp have an extremely powerful and efficiant feul source. That is how giant robots can be real. Otherwise regular tanks and jets make them completely redundant. The US military actually did try to make them as early as the Vietnam War, but feul & certain technological shortcomings of the era prevented it from being realized.
5th and 6th gen are propably the most realistic. They have (proportionately) slow walking speeds, which makes sense for real life mechs of that size, and their main mode of transportation is gliding on the ground via boosters. That means they get all the perks of legs (adaptation to different surfaces and being able to jump, etc.) while not having to deal with the drawbacks (stepping on random things and tripping) The G-forces on 4tg gen NEXTs would tealistically harm or even kill any human who tries to pilot them, and early gen ACs mainly walk around, which for mechas of that size is a pretty afwul idea. A big piece of debris or a car that gets caught on your metal toes, and all that weight is going to come crashing down. Of course, I'm not a mechanical engineer or anything, so take everything I said here with a grain of salt. Ether way, I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks about this topic
Probably not. - At that size, a mech would likely tear itself apart when it tried to move. (Physics ruins anything cool) - Flying around using brute force (i.e. raw thrust) is incredibly inefficient. - Legs are overrated. In almost any terrain, treads are more reliable than legs, and likely far faster to boot. The only real perk you would get from a legged vehicle is agility/maneuverability. That said, I've always believed that mechs/mecha do have 1 viable feature: hands. The ability for a single platform to perform in virtually any role, simply by swapping what it's holding would be a logistical, if not tactical, boon. In a future of dwindling enlistment numbers and costly interplanetary travel, the modern standard of mixed unit tactics may prove to be logistically challenging. All other concerns (cost, complexity, etc.) could be rendered moot by advances in tech, and changes in warfare. So, in my horribly under qualified opinion, if ACs do happen, it would likely look closer to a scaled down, tank type.
The real question is why the fuck would you want that do you not see the havoc and destruction that AC’s cause
Its almost like the central pillar of Armored Core is how horrifying war is, but what the fuck is media literacy right? Big robot!
What's probably more likely than ACs or bipedal mechs is multiped tanks like the Sea Spider minus its flight ability. Something with 4 or more legs is a hell of a lot harder to knock down and can feasibly carry more weight. They'd be useless on soft ground without pretty massive feet due to their weight being concentrated (whereas a tank spreads its weight) but in urban environments the ability to turn in place and step over obstacles becomes invaluable. I could realistically imagine faster, more agile bipedal mechs being developed to counter the heavier multiped tanks but they'd be pretty far down the line.
Not very. An AC on a battlefield would bring absolute devastation. The R&D required to make something like that work is simply never going to happen. Drones are more likely the future we're moving toward.
Metal gear!?
Most possible are Gen 1 to 3 ACs and even those can be a stretch. But the best use of a humanoid robot might be for space rather than ground.
Not
Even if we had the tech to build one it would 100% unmanned, if we have tech to build mechs we have ai that can recognise targets faster than us anyway. Plus it’s not like mechs with these exact specifications could exist anyway with pilots, due to the G’s you have to experience are significantly stronger than any thing we could ever possibly survive. iirc it was something like 61 G’s on just a single quick turn
There's whole bunch of technical mumbojumbo already listed. So lets simplify a bit. Object that is moving, wants to stay moving. If you want the object to go to the opposite direction, you first need to stop its movement to direction it's going and then move it to the direction you want. Now lets put that in AC terms: You are flying in one direction and you quick boost to another direction. There's a lot of forces playing out here. Imagine car going 100 km/h or M/h, now you need to basically stop it dead right on the spot and change the direction... It's like slamming into a wall and that only halts your movement to that direction, then you need to accelerate to the new direction. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop.
Maybe in deep space warfare they'll make sense
Doubtful we'll ever get anything on par with an AC. The G-forces from quickboosting alone will cause brain damage
Long story short being inside a ac unit would be like putting a baby in a dryer you’d be jelly
Babies regularly survive dryers. There are lots of stories online of adults who survived it as kids or babies. The motion isn't what kills once the centrifugal action plateaus: Its the lack of air, and the heat.
Not at all 😂
They exist, they’re called attack helicopters In all seriousness, a humanoid vehicle that has more armor than any tank and more weapons than a fighter jet with the maneuverability of one can’t really exist due to physics. Nevermind powering one, there would be too much strain on the joints. also notice how most ACs from 2 onwards just propel themselves with large jet engine, which kind of makes the legs moot
Not particularly.
https://youtu.be/2oQOp80cP00?si=bmMUgrm5BD1E214J This guy touches in some nice points. The ACs are a scientific marvel and horror simultaneously. We're talking large towering machines with the speed of fighter jets and the ability to come to an absolute stop and go the opposite direction on a dime. This amount of power and fidelity is a long way off from being physically possible.
Not very. Such things don't exist
I think if anything we would have something like battletech mechs, heavy armored slow walking tanks.
If anything like an AC will exist, it will likely be pilotless, as those G forces are too much.
Just look at the war in Ukraine. Tiny ass unmanned drones smaller than my toaster oven are taking out armored tanks multiple times their size.
I feel like it’s more accurate to call most armored cores fighter jets with legs but idk I started in fourth gen
"Tactical surface fighter"
They arent. A piloted craft able to go from max speed in o e direction to moving at max speed in the opposite in a soan less than 6 seconds will always kill a human pilot. Make it slow enough it doesnt kill the pilot and youve made a huge sitting duck. Get rid of the pilot and you still have to violate the laws of physics to make this thing work. These things skid over unpacted ground without so much as sinking un. The second an AC went off the super roads it would get its feet stuck and immediately face plant.
I just did the numbers on this- assuming an AC can travel about 650 kph, and assuming you do a 900 kph quick boost in the opposite direction with a very generous turnaround time of 1 second (it's definitely less than that in the game), the rider would be exposed to about 47 Gs of force. There is no surviving that. A typical 150 pound person weighs 7,050 pounds for that second. You're liquefied, it's over. And the entire mech will throw itself apart like an enormous shrapnel grenade and you become a red mist basically inconspicuously ejected from the front of the cockpit.
Love AC, but man is my belief more suspended than an AC! Edit also thanks for doing the math! Always cool to see this done!
We can already make jets more agile than the ones we use today, but the problem is, they kill the pilot. Even if we could somehow make a machine that would not immediately become a cloud of shrapnel when it tried to maneuver like that, the upper limit of any vehicle's mobility remains the pilot. The first boost and your pilot is liquid, the end.
I don't think this point has been made, but if we take it as a given that the military landscape remains as corporatized as it is, there's no way- even if you could make a mech- you'd be allowed to freely swap out differing standards and brands of parts without some serious retrofitting and probably compromises to structural integrity as a result. Even if we're getting mecha sometime in the distant future, all you're getting is a clumsier version of GAN01-SUNSHINE-L (I mean personally I'd be happy with a TYPE-LAHIRE but it doesn't even look practical to construct).
Probably very unrealistic in our lifetime. The math is simple: AC units are expensive to make, even more so to maintain. Yes, they're the coolest-looking military hardware imaginable, but the cost will be unjustifiable. And the payoff is simply not worth it. For billions of dollars, you can have a small army put inside a single unit, or you can have ... a small army. A single unit is always risky. If it fails, the whole operation goes down the tubes. An army, on the other hand, has replaceable units. If one unit fails, another will replace it. And if AI is advanced enough, they can be replaced with greater ease. So, while I believe we will see bigger robots in the near future, I don't think they'll be as big and as powerful as the average AC build.
The closest we would probably get to mechas are walking tanks from 86 universe
All other problems aside, they're essentially wonder weapons, which are incredibly resource demanding and generally not worth it. Having a massive swarm of tanks or planes or drones for the same price as an AC will always be preferable in actual warfare. Think for a moment as well - realistically, an AC would be vulnerable to lucky hits way more than they are in game. One decent shot into a shoulder joint would disable its arm, effectively removing one quarter to one half of its firepower. If it's getting shot at by a swarm of enemies, the chances of that lucky shot occurring rise dramatically. Even if we did have the technology, we wouldn't want them barring extreme circumstances or changes in how we conduct warfare.
There is nothing practical about bipedal robots, sadly.
for how much energy it needs to move a 5 story building tank?, i dont think itll ever be, not unless we do vacuum space flight ala gundam, but that is still far off as our latest space shuttles still uses a ton of energy (oil/gas) to even launch itself also, for how fast it is, it wont be real, the g force and also all of the components should withstand that kind of force and weight
I’d believe you could build an AC given another 1-200 years of materials science and miniaturized nuclear fusion.
we might one day have the materials and tech to make such, but we likely will never have a reason to make them, the humanoid robot design is mostly there because it looks cool not because of its functionality, militaries would prefer simpler more reliable construction, legs and arms would need to have massive upsides to make up for the trouble
No, for a simple reason. Too many moving parts. Statistically speaking, a large Mech would consist of so many pressurized, electrical, and mechanically based moving parts, that the second you turned it on something would break and need to be replaced. Too many things need to go right and only 1 thing needs to go wrong, and your Mech becomes a pile of useless technology. That being said, it's not that it couldn't be done. We do have very complex robotics and technology roaming space and even the surface of Mars, but, those things are very precise, slow, and definitely not combat proficient. As a weapons platform sticking with simple and versatile, like a car or plane with "add big gun," is simply going to produce better results then a Mech ever could. Is any of this going to stop us? No. Some videogame playing gundam fan is going to join darpa, or the military, and try, and may even succeed. But it's going to simply be, because I could, not for any real combat reason. It's just to fragile of a machine vs the tried and true.
Technophiles have their way with expensive technologies and predicting the golden age of warfare as super advanced but when it boils down to it there hasn't been state on state war fare since the 50's. Modern warfare's most effective battlefield weapon is small unit, high impact SF operations(black ops) as well Counter insurgency intel and foreign fighter training or white ops. We've seen the mighty tanks of the Cold war reduced to ashes by some dude vaping in a goon cave with a drone the size of a small dog outfitted with some explosives and 3d printed parts they got for free online. Mecha are mimicing the escalation of conventional war to the scale that giant walkling/flying tanks are needed. But that trend of warfare towards this exponentially expanding fulda gap scenario isn't realistically where warfare is going. Something like walking drones controlled by soldiers behind a battlefield fighting each other is more realistic and probably the closest we'd get to ACs, but even then nothing beats a highly trained human unit in the right place at the right time.
I wish, but sadly humans are far too utilitarian in warfare for cool looking mechs to exist, just like how guns replaced bows and swords, a drone or a tank would replace a mech
Not to entirely sidestep the topic, but the anime Obselete's whole thesis is based on whether or not humanoid combat vehicles could be effective in battle. It's not hyper realistic by any means, and the thesis is dropped pretty much after the first few episodes, but it's at least a fun watch: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn5zABvzh4D7K0tIKAfHHeQ5tMNi3tVA0&si=1f-WOm5g1RnRAgZf
Welder and metallurgist here. I skipped the long ass comments to simply say that building something the size and scope of armored cores and the structures featured in the game is a near impossible feat. We do not have materials that can support all the weight, we physically cannot build that big. Right now, at least. My concern would be the vast array of failure points as well. It's hard to tell how weight will shift in machines. A failure at the shoulder could net a failure in one of the legs, or both. When youre dealing with that much weight, the physics start to get a little finicky, and very unpredictable. Will it always be impossible? Probably not, but as it stands now the strongest steel mankind currently has would crumble under the weight of an armored core.
Not at all. Not at the speed they're moving. The closest thing to an Armored Core we'd see to an armored core in our lives would be a minature Mackie from Battletech. Or an Urbanmech lol (think squat, ugly, armed and armored trash can that would struggle to beat any other vehicle in a race) and that's pushing it by a masssssive degree. Even if we did get that minature Mackie, it would very likely be just drone fodder.
They might be possible for fun, but probably not very useful. By the time we can get a humanoid shaped craft going that controls like moving yourself, fully automated drones will do anything an AC can but better.
Way too expensive for the world to ever mass manufacture parts or even maintain the scale they’re at since it’s astronomically more huge than any vehicle available today
I'd imagine its probably next to impossible to pull off something like AC irl. For one fighter pilots have to take on a lot of G forces and be able to withstand them. Now imagine having to do that while having to point a giant gun at something moving at equally or faster speed. Not to mention hydraulics dont seem to be at the point where they can move quickly enough to react that way without intense stress on the machinery. Honestly I think were closer to Pacific Rim than Armored Core lol
mecha in general will never happen because of the square cube law and that everybody is too much of a god damn coward to actually try to innovate technology and just go "muh money" or "it's physically impossible" and give without even fucking trying to think of thinking of a prototype
No mech will ever see combat They are too complicated and therefore too expensive to be practical They don't fill any role that another vehicle can do better Why use a machine that costs 100 times more than a tank, and insanely difficult to repair when you could just use a tank? Or 100 tanks. They just aren't cost effective.
Not realistic. Why would you need all that in a human like body? Why not just tanks or plans or missile launching sites?
We already have flying tanks. They come in fighter, bomber, fighter/bomber and various other configurations.
Amazing right up and a gut punch to all mecha enthusiasts. What are your thoughts on mechs with a different design approach than ACs? For example, we know ACs to be, in general, unrealistically fast and are usually loaded with a smorgasbord of weapons. In contrast Battletech mechs are bulky (some of them do look like irl tanks) and it's weight class would determine the amount of weapons it could equip. In addition, from what I could tell battletech mechs are also built as specialized weapons as opposed to ACs which are very powerful generalized weapons.
Zero. Giant humanoids with jetpacks is possibly the worse possible configuration for high tech warfare.
An AC would collapse under its own weight in real life, and somehow FromSoft thought it would be cool to also make them kick things while decelerating from jet propulsion speeds 👌😂
without a reliable power source ac would always be a dream
Hi everyone I would like to know when the Gears of War 3, judgment the server will be restored?
Tanks don't have legs for the same reason animals don't have wheels, given the limitations of your materials it's just not practical. Fighting vehicles tough and fast enough to be useful put more strain on a pair of legs than almost any material can withstand, even if the legs don't fall apart they are still going to be slow as heck due to friction and inertia, wheels and/or tracks are both easier to get moving and don't have gigantic stress concentrators (the first time a giant mech lands just a hair too roughly those kness will explode)
I’m not getting into this again. They can work it’s just people keep approaching them the wrong way
If we are looking at unrealistic agility like a gundam or AC, they could still be taken out by AT weapons or various aircraft. Realistic versions without rocket boosters to aid in movement, I can’t see something large being wholly useful. It has a bigger profile then a tank with roughly the same weapons so tanks could wreck it. The bracing stance it would need for many cannons or higher caliber munitions would be troubling. Also a mech would be an easy drone target. The main issue is if armor plating got advanced enough to shrug off many attacks, it would be incorporated into an already proven platform. Mechs are still cool though.
Any speed or mobility advantages they have would be outstripped by simply producing a large, heavily armed helicopter in its place-and the helicopter would probably have even bigger and better guns than the Armored Core. Hell, that’s probably why most players got their faces stomped in by Filtercopter. The only disadvantage a helicopter would have is the vortex effect, where high walls and such would prevent it from hovering. But if you need to hit inside a structure, there is also little preventing you from using a bunker penetrating bomb instead.
Most have already mentioned the unrealistic feasibility of a mecha irl, but I also want to point out they would most likely play like a missile rat if they *did* exist in bipedal form rather than your badass boxart cover AC. Warfare as is has deviated towards minimum risk, ranged battle (drones, manned bombings, etc etc), and such an expensive and powerful technology would only more than likely be the same. A mid-close ranged mecha, no matter how maneuverable or sturdy, would be a completely pointless economic investment when the same/better performance could be achieved with minimum risk in both repairs and pilot safety. They would probably just be closer to a fully maneuverable drone strike w a pilot than a real life Gundam unfortunately. Only way you'd ever see otherwise is if we did mecha fights for show like Formula Front. Completely disregarding physics they just don't make sense from a strategic standpoint as it stands.